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What do I do if I'm having trouble giving Mathematica the password and/or license number?

Are you including all the punctuation (dashes, colons, capital L)? Are the name and the organization fields non-blank?

If these are confirmed and the installation appeared to be successful, search your system and delete all files named mathpass. Then launch the Mathematica kernel and enter the password information through its prompts.

•	To launch the kernel in Windows click Start > Programs > Wolfram Mathematica > Mathematica 6 Kernel.

•	To launch the kernel in Mac OS X you can either double-click the MathKernel icon from the Finder window or launch a Terminal window and enter the path to the kernel.

a.	In a Finder window, navigate to the /Applications directory, CTRL-[click] (or right-click) Mathematica.app, and choose Show Package Contents in the popup menu. In the window that appears, open the Contents/MacOS folder and double-click the MathKernel icon. A standalone kernel window will open.

In a Terminal window, the command to execute the MathKernel is typically /Applications/Mathematica.app/Contents/MacOS/MathKernel for Mathematica 6, and /Applications/Mathematica\ 5.2.app/Contents/MacOS/MathKernel for Mathematica 5.2 (or similar for older versions). Note that any spaces must be escaped with a backslash. Or you can change directories to the /Applications/.../Contents/MacOS/ directory and start the kernel by executing ./MathKernel.

•

To launch the kernel in Linux/Unix launch a terminal window and enter math. In some cases, it will be necessary to enter the path to the kernel. Typically, this is /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/Executables/MathKernel for Mathematica 6 (or similar for older versions-replace 6.0 with the appropriate version number). Or you can change directories to the /usr/.../Executables/ directory and start the kernel by executing ./MathKernel.

An advantage of using the kernel is that the information, prompts, typed responses, and error messages can be copied from the Kernel window and pasted into an email. Please contact Wolfram Technical Support with this information if you have trouble giving Mathematica your password. Please be sure to include the operating system, OS version, and CPU type.

Download this FAQ as a Mathematica 6.0 Notebook

Questions or comments about this FAQ? Send email to support@wolfram.com.