MATLAB

Prerequisites

At a minimum, you don't need much to run MATLAB. It will run in the console without X just fine, though naturally missing some functionality such as graphing. Most users, however, use many of the bells and whistles. The Prerequisites section is made with that in mind.

To use the MATLAB desktop, GUIDE, Simulink, and all the nice graphs, you need to have ["Java"] installed, and the executable in your path. If you don't, you'll have to run from a terminal, which isn't always the greatest. A quick way to check to see if you have Java in your path is to open a terminal and type which java. If it comes back with something similar to /usr/local/bin, you're good to go, otherwise you need to follow the instructions in the ["Java"] How-To.

You will get far better performance making complex graphs if you are using hardware rendered openGL. In other words, a videocard. Open up a terminal and run the following command. {{ grep Driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf }} If you have a line that says either fglrx or nvidia, you're in good shape. If you get ati or nv, you need to install the proprietary drivers for your card. If you get vesa, i810, or something else, you probably don't have a video card, and will just have to accept lower performance.

Installing MATLAB

MATLAB's install script will not run from a mounted cdrom.

"NOT true! The problem installing from the CD is due to the fact that when the CD automatically mounts, shell scripts are not permitted to be run.

If you mount the CD yourself (first unmount the CD at the command line: umount /media/cdrom), using:

mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt

then run the install:

/mnt/install

everything works fine."

Oddly, this is not due to default settings mounting cd-drives with -noexec, but some mystical and poorly understood voodoo. The cure is to copy the disk to your harddrive, and then run the install. To copy the disk, open a terminal and type the following

sudo cp -R /media/cdrom0 /tmp/matlab

Once that's done copying over, in the terminal type

sudo sh /tmp/matlab/install_unix.sh

It will then launch the GUI installer. For your root directory, enter /usr/local/matlab, and agree to make the directory. Then click the box labelled Create symbolic links to MATLAB and mex scripts, and select /usr/local/bin. Continue with the OK buttons until it starts to install. Once it is installed, running the command matlab will launch the MATLAB UI.

You can pass additional options to start MATLAB, in the format matlab -option. Here are a few of the most popular ones.

-nodesktop             Start MATLAB in a console, without the GUI - much faster loading.
-nosplash              Don't show that annoying MATLAB splash screen as it loads.
-nojvm                 Do not start Java support.  This also causes -nodesktop.
-r "command"           Start MATLAB and execute the given command.
-h                     Show more MATLAB options.

An example command would be matlab -nojvm -nosplash -r "1+1"

Missing cellfun.mexglx (and other files)

If you are installing Matlab (Version 7.0.1.24704 (R14) Service Pack 1) on a x86 machine with Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) there could be some problems with the permissions on file /etc/libc.so.6, which, by default, does not have executable permission and does not behave like it is expected by some scripts. When some scripts (install and startup scripts) try to query the version of the libc file, they are returned empty strings. Possibly because of this issue, some of the mexglx files are not installed and when matlab starts up, the script ${matlab_dir}/bin/util/oscheck.sh also reports the following error.

/opt/matlab/bin/util/oscheck.sh: line 134: /lib/libc.so.6: Permission denied

The file ${matlab_dir}/toolbox/matlab/datatypes/cellfun.mexglx was not installed and this could cause problems when trying to execute a simple command such as ls, for e.g.,

>> ls 
??? Attempt to execute SCRIPT cellfun as a function. 
Error in ==> iscellstr at 13
  res = cellfun('isclass',s,'char'); 
Error in ==> ls at 16 
if iscellstr(varargin)

One way to solve this would be to modify two lines in the scripts ${matlab_dir}/bin/util/oscheck.sh as well as in the script ${matlab_install_cd}/install. Line 697 of ${matlab_install_cd}/install