It may happen that your flavor of GNU/Linux is not one of the ones listed, or
that you do not have root access, and so you can't use the automatic method of
installing Macaulay 2 in the right location.  (The right location for M2 is in
/usr/bin, so it's on your path.)

These instructions tell you what to do in that case, and they are a little more
complicated.

In brief summary, the steps are to download two tar files, to untar them (into
any directory), to run the resulting M2 program, and to execute the Macaulay 2
command "setup()".  The next time you log in, M2 will be on your path, and the
f12 key in emacs will start it up in an interactive buffer.

We now explain in more detail.

Starting with release 1.1, there are two files that must be downloaded, one
containing the files needed just for your architecture, and the other
containing the files shared in common by all distributions.  The former
includes an indication of the architecture in its name, and the latter includes
the word "common" or the word "all" in its name, depending on the distribution
style.  An example:

	Macaulay2-1.2-i386-Linux-Generic.tar.gz
	Macaulay2-1.2-common.tar.gz

(Replace "1.2" by the current version number and "i386" by your architecture.
The term "Generic" indicates that we have compiled it to depend on as few
dynamic libraries as possible.)

Get the former file from the appropriate subdirectory of this directory,
depending upon your architecture and operating system release and issue.  Get
the latter file from the subdirectory of this directory named "Common".

After downloading the files to an temporary empty directory, extract the
component files with commands like these:

	tar xzf Macaulay2-1.2-i386-Linux-Generic.tar.gz
	tar xzf Macaulay2-1.2-common.tar.gz

and then read further installation instructions in

        Macaulay2-1.2/INSTALL

Oops, that doesn't seem to be there, so look at INSTALL-1.2 in this directory of
the web site.