Some programs, alas, still aren't IPv6 friendly. And Fedora Core 6 likes to have only an IPv6 entry for localhost in its hosts file. This can cause a problem with those few programs, wxMaxima (or xmaxima or any other fancy interface to Maxima) in particular (hpssd.py also had some problems in FC6 test releases, but seems to have been fixed). You may be getting the message "Maxima started, waiting for connection..." and shortly thereafter "Maxima process terminated." Check your /etc/hosts file. You'll probably find the line:

::1 localhost.localdomain localhost

But Maxima wants:

127.0.0.1 localhost

No problem, just add it in there. Now start up wxMaxima, or if it's already running select the Maxima menu and click "Restart maxima." Check it out! wxMaxima works just like you've always wanted!

Hopefully the problem gets fixed sooner than later, but for the present this provides a usable workaround...

UPDATE: Ubuntu users facing this problem are in luck as well: Karin writes in: Thanks! Worked for me too. I installed Ubuntu 6.10, Maxima 5.9.3, Wxmaxima 0.6.5.