Installing from U of A sitelicense

Note - this won't be of much use to you unless you work at the University of Arizona, are a student, or are some other eligible person.

There are detailed instructions at: U of A Matlab Sitelicense.

Installing 2012a in May of 2012

When I go to the Mathworks site and tell it I want to download all the components, it hands me a "download_agent", which it says is a JNLP file of size 2.1K. My browser want to either save it or open it with an editor. It seems to be just a chunk of XML - maybe some browsers would do something clever with it, my firefox doesn't seem interested in it though. JNLP is "Java Network Launching Protocol".

I found a nice article about fixing firefox to do this right. The key thing to handle this is the /usr/bin/javaws executable. The file to edit is: 

/home/tom/.mozilla/firefox/sxigwd03.default/mimeTypes.rdf
This file is a giant wad of XML and what you do is to edit it and add (or modify) an entry to look like this:
Thanks to this guys blog for the details.

Nice try, but it didn't work and I am getting fed up.

For information about "web start" see this link

What I do is a manual download of each component one by one (A mind numbing process of selecting 55 items). I bypass a number of items. DO NOT DO THIS! The documentation on the Mathworks site tells you to, but ... You should just download the installer, it will get everything else for you. I found this, rather to my dismay after 165 mouse clicks downloading the 55 packages I selected.

Just download the installer zip file and then: 

unzip matlab_R2012a_glnxa64_installer.zip
./install
Now I find out (when I elect to install via the network) that all that clicking and such was a giant waste of time because the install program is downloading everything for me

After this I enter my name, password, the activation key from elicense.txt and I am on the air.

Reactivating R2011b in May of 2012

I haven't used the current copy of matlab in quite a while, and when I went to run it, I got: 
License checkout failed.
License Manager Error -9
The hostid of your computer (044b80808003) does not match the hostid of the license file (0015f2b0b043).
Apparently this happens when you update operating systems or install a new hard drive.
What I do is: 
cd /u1/Mathworks_2011b/bin
./activate_matlab.sh
I need my mathworks user name and password, and the activation code from the UA sitelicense site. The activation code (elicense.txt) is 5 groups of 5 digits.

Now Matlab 2011b runs and I can use Help-->"Check for updates" This just tells me there are none for 2011b, to get 2012a, I need to go to the matlab site and download it.

Installing 2011b in October of 2011

It more or less went like this (or did for me).
  1. Go to the link above.
  2. Click on the download button, it will ask you to authenticate with your University NetID.
  3. Get the elicense.txt file (this is a one line file with an activation code you cut and paste into a form later).
  4. Go to the mathworks site.
  5. Set up an account there and associate it with the UA license. I already had an account and it was properly associated (thank you!).
  6. Download your product (I downloaded 2011b in October of 2011), this was 2.9 Gigabytes !!
  7. I put the download in one place, then the installed software in another, and was annoyed that the first path I chose was really what I would have wanted for the final installed software. Also note that the downloaded packages do not get deleted.
  8. After downloading, you install.
  9. After installing, you activate.
  10. My activation is via license 356115 "Total Academic Headcount" license.
  11. 2011b is also known as MATLAB 7.13
After all this was done, in my case anyhow, the whole ball of wax was in /u2/Mathworks_2011b. The original download files I left in /u2/Mathworks_2011b_64_download and could probably delete. The matlab executable was in /u2/Mathworks_2011b/bin/matlab and I made a symbolic link from /usr/local/bin/matlab11 to this so that when I type "matlab", I still get 2007b, but if I type matlab11 I get 2011b, which makes sense for things I do.

I was also instructed to type mbuild -setup from the matlab prompt the first time I run it to set up my local compiler. I did this and it informed me that it was placing an "options file" in ~/.matlab/R2011b/mbuildopts.sh, and that was it. I guess I can examine and edit this if I need to.

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org