R2020a installer Hangs on fresh Ubuntu 22.04

Hello,

I am totally stumped and am experiencing unusual problems installing Matlab R2020 on a fresh Ubuntu 22.04 machine having previously installed Matlab on several other Ubuntu machines (ie.20.04, 18.04 etc) I can successfully download the installer (and or the ISO) both install methods hang with an icon appearing on the ubuntu desktop sidebar but no window actually launching.

Methods employed:

• Download install package from Mathworks and unzip it in the Ubuntu Desktop GUI, then using the terminal to install via the normal sudo install command (below). Running the installer results in a matlab icon being launched in the desktop sidebar. Right clicking the icon (to reveal all windows) reveals a small window graphic of the installer but no window actually appears.

    sudo ./install

I tried methods mentioned in this [ post ] and another [ post ] but each fail in the same way. Running without sudo has no effect.

ie.

    xhost +SI:localuser:root

ie.

    sudo unzip -X -K matlab_R2020a_glnxa64.zip -d matlab_R2020a_installer

• Downloading the full ISO from Mathworks and mounting the installer with the "Disk Image Mounter". After mounting the installer I try to perform the install as above. The installer hangs exactly the same way.

I know that the given machine is fine. It's 2 months old and previously had Ubuntu 20.04 installed with the a working copy of R2020. I decided to format the machine and install a completely fresh version of 22.04 which produced the above error.

Finally, I have also tried installing lsb. It had no effect on the above error.

What am I missing?

Help is much appreciated. A sincere thanks in advance!

[Hans Scharler]

This video from Phil Parisi helped me get throught the installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNHJkCo5sOc

Answer 1

[Marco Restelli]

Hi,

I have been struggling with this as well and finally found a solution, I post it here for reference even if this is an old thread.

As discussed in

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Matlab#Installer_not_launching_on_openrc_systems

the installer can stall because it is unable to open a window. Running

bin/glnxa64/MATLABWindow 

from the installer tree is a way to find out what the problem is. For me, the problem is the fact that the bundled libstdc++.so.6 from the installer is not compatible with the system provided libraries. Removing

rm sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6*
rm bin/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6*

from the installer, so that it uses the system library, solved the problem. To check that the installer indeed is using the system library use

$ ldd bin/glnxa64/MATLABWindow | grep libstdc
libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/12/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00007f737a0c9000)

and check that the path is indeed pointing to the system library /usr/lib/...

Hope it helps!

Marco