What should I do if the Mathematica installer gives me the message: The installer was unable to check for a valid password file. Your Mathematica installation may be incomplete or corrupted?

This message can indicate that the installation completed but the Mathematica kernel is unable to run. To check if this is the situation, try to launch the Mathematica kernel by itself. To launch the kernel in Linux/Unix, open a terminal window and execute the following command.

math

In some cases one will need to enter the full path to the kernel. Typically, this is the following:

/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/Executables/MathKernel

...for Mathematica 6.0 (this is similar for older versions - simply replace 6.0 with the appropriate version number). Note that any spaces must be escaped with a backslash. If the math script does not start the kernel you can change directories to the /usr/.../Executables/ directory and start the kernel by executing the following command.

./MathKernel

Note any error messages. The most common causes of the Mathematica kernel failing on Linux are covered in FAQs in http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/linux/general/.

An advantage of using the kernel is that the information, prompts, typed responses, and error messages can be copied as text from the text window and pasted into an email. If you contact Technical Support about the error, please include your license number along with the operating system distribution/version and the CPU type.

Download this FAQ as a Mathematica 6.0 Notebook

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