Arch Linux User Repository

TODO:

1. Figure out the users and permissions. Currently, /opt/MATLAB/${_release} has 777 permissions, which is obviously undesired. It might be better to create a user group and require users to manually add themselves to it for security reasons.

2. Improve the installer. For example, the current inotify watcher spams stdout and does not account for the end of the download/installation or the width of the terminal, which results in flaky output.

3. Figure out the dependencies. The list of Debian/RHEL dependencies is public, but it includes some seemingly unneeded packages. This might be because they are required by dependent products/add-ons. Additionally, the current logic for removing bundled dependencies should probably be rewritten. Maintaining an exhaustive list for a single release is very difficult, and these components change without notice. Moreover, the current approach may go against the Arch KISS philosophy. Ideally, we should remove only the problematic components like Qt, XCB, libtiff, gcc-libs, fontconfig, etc.

4. Add auto-discovery for packages written for MATLAB. My plan was to use /usr/lib/MATLAB/${_release} for release-specific modules and /usr/lib/MATLAB/common for shared (mostly architecture-independent) packages. However, load order matters, and "common" modules need to specify which releases they are compatible with. This means we need to implement our own logic for discovering and loading these, likely via hooks, shell scripts, and configuration files (perhaps TOML could work?).

5. Fix the Python components. python-matlabengine does install the Python components built against the version of Python shipped by Arch. However, some proprietary CPython components are not included and are built against ancient Python versions. This likely requires version spoofing or some alternative approach.

6. Write and upload packages for previous MATLAB releases. It is entirely possible to have multiple releases installed simultaneously. I have a few of these packages myself, but they are drafts and not suitable for upload to the AUR.

7. Write and upload packages for MATLAB-dependent add-ons and products. When installing MATLAB required user intervention for source access, it was acceptable to break reproducibility and manually specify required products for installation. Now that we use MPM, it would be better to separate products into individual packages. These packages would install themselves and their dependencies into a specific location, then use appdata to install only the component's files. The problem is that MATLAB often includes conflicting files that need to be combined or overwritten. Obviously, we can't allow that, so a hook must be implemented to, for example, combine *.combine@matlab-simulink and replace *.replace@matlab-documentation files with backups. Needless to say, this is challenging to implement, so the previous approach (having users specify the product list) might still be preferred.

8. Write and upload the matlab-runtime package. I have a draft, but the problem with this package is that it installs the runtime for every available product. Ideally, for source-built packages, we would want to makedepend on matlab-$product and depend on matlab-$product-runtime. However, this is not possible without splitting the runtime packages, which poses the challenges described above. I’ll try my best to revisit this sometime later.

@aoneko, @Reexys, please read the post-installation instructions. If you've lost them, you can find the same information here.

Any chance that MATLAB is lying to you? They have been known to sweep OpenGL issues under the rug

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/239279-hardware-based-opengl-on-linux#answer_220778

"In the three cases listed previously hardware accelerated versions of Mesa are in fact being used. The problem is that the value of the OpenGL info 'software' field is actually incorrect. This issue has been fixed in R2016a."

Maybe they broke something again.

Hi, I messed up my MATLAB installation when I wanted to add additional packages from the GUI. I then decided to uninstall it with sudo pacman -R matlab, and then run the installation again. I followed the installation instructions, this time also installing additional packages. The installation seemed to run correctly, but now when I start matlab from the terminal, I get:MATLAB is selecting SOFTWARE OPENGL rendering., and with $ matlab -nosoftwareopengl, I get nothing. What can I do? Where can I look for error messages or hints of what may be wrong? I'm considering trying to install this again in a VirtualBox.

Also, I keep getting:

Error: No classpath definition jar found.
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().

Which apparently means one of the addons can't find the jars in ./matlab/java (./src/matlab/java) that it needs. i'm on a new system and my xorg/i3 isn't quite set up completely. i'm not sure if this is something I can fix by setting the java classpath env var or whether it's actually missing files.

here are the extensions i'm installing:

"MATLAB", "Simulink", "Bioinformatics_Toolbox", "Control_System_Toolbox", "Curve_Fitting_Toolbox", "Deep_Learning_Toolbox", "Econometrics_Toolbox", "Financial_Instruments_Toolbox", "Financial_Toolbox", "Instrument_Control_Toolbox", "MATLAB_Coder", "MATLAB_Compiler", "MATLAB_Report_Generator", "Optimization_Toolbox", "Partial_Differential_Equation_Toolbox", "Reinforcement_Learning_Toolbox", "Robotics_System_Toolbox", "Simulink_3D_Animation", "Simulink_Check", "Simulink_Code_Inspector", "Simulink_Coder", "Simulink Control_Design", "Simulink_Test", "Statistics_and_Machine_Learning_Toolbox", "Symbolic_Math_Toolbox", "Wavelet_Toolbox"

after running the matlab installer, the install.sh script runs makepkg, which can't find these files in the prepare() phase

./src/matlab/installer_input.txt ./src/matlab/install.txt

it seems to pick these up if I just copy them to the required location.

however, running the install.sh script a second time replaces the matlab.tar file with a version of MATLABROOT that has its files deleted. it might help to error out if matlab.tar already exists bc it's been a bit confusing.

another issue that i'm running into is that Ctrl-c on big cp ops leaves my /tmp/ directory full, which causes the script to error again.

@TheHardew @AlexBocken fixed now, thanks. Can't say how it worked without issues until few weeks ago haha.

I had the same issue as @TheHardew, his proposed fix in line 207 fixed the installation for me.

@Rubo thank you so much for your work on updating this PKGBUILD!

I think it should be ls -d at line 207 in "Changing around locations if spoofing is needed..."? I got errors without it:
mv: cannot stat 'dependency_links.txt'$'\n''PKG-INFO'$'\n''SOURCES.txt'$'\n''top_level.txt': No such file or directory

@rellieberman the MATLAB installer will not care, but you will likely run into problems with pacman if you either try and reinstall the current version or upgrade the package to a new version.

Hi all, and thanks for all the amazing work! I have a question, if I want to add more packages after a partial install, do I have to redo the whole installation? is there a way to just add the new packages I need? Thanks

Thanks for all the great work! Sadly I am stuck with the same log as this comment. I have downloaded the latest PKGBUILD 'pkgrel=5', 'pkgver=9.12.0.1903524' and Matlab <version>9.12.0.1927505</version> which sets pkgrel and pkgver correctly. Still building gets stuck at the non-existent folder ${srcdir}/build/extern/engines/python. Do you have any guidance for me?