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.

I got problem with the python version using Manjaro Linux KDE Plasma 5.19.5 running makepkg for R2020a.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "setup.py", line 15, in <module>
    raise EnvironmentError('MATLAB Engine for Python supports Python version'
OSError: MATLAB Engine for Python supports Python version 2.7, 3.6, and 3.7, but your version of Python is 3.8
==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
    Aborting...

Is there a simple fix? I think python 3.8 is required by manjaro packages ...

Sorry for the message spam; but brought the pkgbuild up to 2020b. It works with all the features I tested with (hardware acceleration, jupyter notebook using python engine, gui using bspwm). If anyone is using this PKGBUILD; please let me know if compilation works (switched to native libraries) Also; gcc6 is let go in favor of gcc9; which is in the community repos so you can drop the aur dependency.

READ THE README FILE IN THE REPO. NO AUR HELPERS SUPPORTED. ONLY ARCHLINUX AS OS IS SUPPORTED. YOU SHOULD BE BUILDING THIS PACKAGE USING MAKEPKG, NOTHING ELSE WILL BE SUPPORTED. Please only post issues here AFTER you followed the README.md. located at the root of this repo: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/README.md?h=matlab Due to a lot of comments; my spam filter is removing AUR notifications which keeps me from responding timely to issues in packaging, please don't post if you don't do some troubleshooting yourself. If your skill level is not up to troubleshooting (or following simple instructions as laid out by the readme), just install matlab locally, without using this package.

• This PKGBUILD is NOT a minimal installation; as it has (hard) dependencies to gcc8 to force MATLAB to use system libraries. While generally not required; this PKGBUILD is trying to make MATLAB work with the system rather than with the mathworks-provided binaries. Currently it also does the python integration so that jupyter can be used with it.
• This will only work with 2020b version; and will not work with earlier (or later) versions.
• This PKGBUILD DOES NOT DOWNLOAD MATLAB FOR YOU. The EULA prevents redistribution of the software. Read the README.md file contained in the PKGBUILD repo. This is essentially a script to integrate an existing matlab installer with your archlinux system; it does NOT come with any software from Mathworks. You most likely cannot build this package using an AUR helper; you NEED to manually provide files; and to get the files you need a valid MATLAB licence. The process of fetching the files is described in detail in the README.md in the repo. (You can use any valid credentials to install the package using this PKGBUILD; including a licence file that does not match the machine; but you will need to reactivate matlab by using activate_matlab.sh with root privileges.)
• Current users; please help me test and trim the dependencies list, and submit your personal fixes for issues if you have them so they can be added to the PKGBUILD. (Cuda related contributions; if needed would be good as I don't have nvidia GPU's to test compatibility.)
• To use jupyter with matlab; you also need jupyter-matlab_kernel(-git).

Agreed, this package sorely needs an update, r2020b supports python3.8 and gtk3 out of the box.

As this is flagged out of date since half a year, I would kindly ask @greyltc to add @bbaserdem as a comaintainer as proposed below.

Would it be possible to add the file type associations and icons to the script? In the installation directory of the Windows version there are 25 icons for different filetypes. If there is a way of auto-extracting these from the Linux installer that would be great. Even just .m .mat and .fig would be good.

@greyltc if you make me a comaintainer or deliver the package to me; I can update the pkgbuild to 2020a; I have a good one working linked in my previous post and actively update versions in between releases; and will be doing so until next year for sure.

If anyone is interested with a working PKGBUILD; I edited my private one to work with 2020a; https://github.com/bbaserdem/Matlab/blob/master/PKGBUILD

I tried matching the dependency list with all the packages in the dockerfile. Most of the debian packages are in the arch repos; or at least AUR, but the versions referanced on the dockerfile are older than arch versions. A lot of these dependencies are probably not needed; but I don't want to test what works and what breaks one-by-one.

Still I can install just fine. Do note that matlab installer does need libselinux to run; and is needed to generate the tar.

Echoing what japm48 said, R2020a has a new installer which depends on libselinux to run. The new installer gives you the option to download files without installing which will make using this PKGBUILD slightly easier. Also, I think Mathworks changed some other stuff because, unlike previous versions, once installed I didn't have to change Matlab's glib symlinks to point to system libraries to get the add-ons manager to work.