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Launching Mathematica on Windows

Launching Mathematica Locally

To run Mathematica using a network license, both the client machine and the license server must be on the network, and MathLM must be running.

To Launch Mathematica:

From the Start menu, choose Programs ► Wolfram Mathematica ► Mathematica 7.
Alternatively, you can open an Explorer window, go to the Program Files\Wolfram Research\Mathematica\7.0 directory, and double-click the Mathematica icon.

To Launch Only the Mathematica Kernel:

From the Start menu, choose Programs ► Wolfram Mathematica ► Mathematica 7 Kernel.
Alternatively, you can open an Explorer window, go to the Program Files\Wolfram Research\Mathematica\7.0 directory, and double-click the MathKernel icon.

To Launch the Mathematica Kernel inside a Command Prompt Window:

Open a command prompt window and change directory to the top-level Mathematica installation directory. Type .\math and press Enter.

Launching Mathematica from a File Server

You can also run Mathematica directly from a file server, without installing files locally. To do this, install Mathematica on the file server and make the installation directory accessible to the client machines. Running Mathematica from a file server differs from running a local copy in several ways. These differences and appropriate steps for working around them are listed here.
  • The Mathematica fonts will not be available for use by other applications. It is therefore required that you manually install the fonts on your system. The fonts are found in SystemFiles\Fonts\Windows in the Mathematica layout. To install these fonts so they can be used by all other Windows applications, open the Fonts control panel, choose Install New Font under the File menu, and specify the location of the fonts in the Add Fonts dialog box that appears.
  • The MathLink libraries will not be available for use by other applications. Therefore, you need to copy the MathLink libraries to the appropriate locations on your system. For 32-bit Windows systems, the MathLink libraries consist of seven files: ml32i1.dll, ml32i2.dll, ml32i3.dll, mlmap32.mlp, mlshm32.mlp, mltcp32.mlp, and mltcpip32.mlp, which are located in SystemFiles\Links\MathLink\DeveloperKit\Windows\SystemAdditions in the Mathematica layout. Copy these files to the WINNT\System32 folder on Windows 2000, or the Windows\System32 folder on Windows XP/Vista. For 64-bit Windows platforms, the MathLink libraries consist of twelve files: ml32i1.dll, ml32i2.dll, ml32i3.dll, mlmap32.mlp, mlshm32.mlp, mltcp32.mlp, and mltcpip32.mlp, which are located in SystemFiles\Links\MathLink\DeveloperKit\Windows\SystemAdditions, and ml64i2.dll, ml64i3.dll, mlshm64.mlp, mltcp64.mlp, mltcpip64.mlp, which are located in SystemFiles\Links\MathLink\DeveloperKit\Windows-x86-64\SystemAdditions. Copy the first seven files to the Windows\Syswow64 folder and the other five files to the Windows\System32 folder.
  • The proper file associations will not be set up for Mathematica. You can set these associations manually by using the Folder Options dialog box under the Tools menu of the Explorer window. You will need to specify the MIME type as application/mathematica and the file extension as .nb.
  • A Start menu entry for Mathematica will not be created automatically. You can add this manually by editing the Start menu settings in the dialog box that appears when you choose Settings ► Taskbar and Start Menu under the Start menu.

Mathematica Command-Line Options

Following are several useful command-line options for the Mathematica kernel. See "Launching Mathematica on Windows: Locally" for instructions on running the kernel.

Command-Line Options

-lmverboseprint diagnostic information to stderr
-mathlinkspecify that the kernel should be run in MathLink mode
-nopromptspecify that no banner or In/Out prompts should be printed
-password strspecify a password to use instead of the password or passwords stored in the mathpass file
-pwfile filespecify the name of a file that has a valid password
-runspecify a command to be run on startup as an argument

Mathematica command-line options.

The option -lmverbose is useful for debugging problems related to the license server.
The option -mathlink can also be used as a command-line option for the Mathematica front end. See www.wolfram.com/solutions/mathlink for additional information about MathLink.
The mode set by -noprompt is useful for running a sequence of commands from a batch file.
The string for -password should have the form "!servername" or "machinename mathid licensenumber password".
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