Anyone using MATLAB on a LINUX OS??

Hi, I am thinking of moving to a LINUX REDHAT operating system. Does MATLAB work/work well on this OS??

James

Answer 1

[Thomas]

Have tested on Ubuntu 10.04, 11.10, and Redhat 6. Work pretty well..

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

Some versions of Linux can have font problems, requiring non-default fonts to be installed.

Some versions of Linux can have problems with the system X libraries, as the system X libraries are sometimes optimized versions that do not quite implement X properly; it might be necessary to install a real X library add add it to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH of the MATLAB executable.

A small number of video cards are known to be incompatible under Linux.

Linux does not support ActiveX at all.

Some of the toolboxes are not supported under Linux.

However, for all of these issues, MATLAB runs well under Linux.

[Brad]

Walter, I'm looking for a reference to the topic you mention above where some of the toolboxes are not supported under Linux. Do you have such a reference? Thank you.

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/content/dam/mathworks/mathworks-dot-com/support/sysreq/files/2017b_Product_Availability.pdf

• Data Acquisition Toolbox (only available under Windows)
• Model-Based Calibration Toolbox (only available under Windows)
• OPC Toolbox (only available under Windows)
• Simulink PLC Coder (only available under Windows)
• Simulink Realtime (only available under Windows)
• Spreadsheet Link (only available under Windows) (uses ActiveX)
• Trading Toolbox (only available under Windows) (uses ActiveX)
• Vehicle Network Toolbox (only available under Windows)

There are several toolboxes that are available under Windows and Linux but not on Mac.

[Steven Lord]

Another way to access information about which products are supported on which platform (and information about required / recommended products) is via the System Requirements page. See the Product Requirements link on that page.

Answer 3

[Geoff]

MatLab directly supports many Linux flavours, including Red Hat: http://www.mathworks.com/support/sysreq/current_release/linux.html

What do you mean by "work well"?

If you are in doubt, you can always dual-boot your system.

Answer 4

[Dr. Seis]

Works fine for me on Redhat... running it on a 12-core, 96GB machine at work. Any simple-ish benchmarks you looking to test/measure before making the move?

Answer 5

[Mika Mäki]

The live editor and App Designer do not work properly on Kubuntu (tested on 18.04 and 19.04 with MATLAB R2019a). Getting the live editor to work requires manual installation of certain libraries as described in this thread. Also, typing in the live editor has a very annoying latency as described in this thread, and text input does not work at all on App Designer windows without tricks, as described in this thread.

The installer does not set proper permissions for ~/.matlab, and this results in a wall of error messages when first starting MATLAB. A workaround is to set the proper permissions with

sudo chown your_username ~/.matlab -R

Installation using a university license does not properly, and requires copying an error message to LibreOffice or similar application to click a hyperlink that it contains, as described in this thread.

Overall, it appears that there is no proper quality control for MATLAB on GNU/Linux, and therefore I'd recommend Python over MATLAB for GNU/Linux users.

[Walter Roberson]

https://www.mathworks.com/support/requirements/platform-road-map.html shows MATLAB has never offered Kubuntu support.

I have installed matlab into a variety of Linux virtual machines and I have never seen the wall of error messages mentioned as being triggered by permissions. Error messages caused by missing or incompatible libraries I have seen, and some of them are tough to get through.

Unfortunately the Linux distribution system is very badly fragmented and it is common for Linux distributions to make incompatible updates or stop installing library versions.

I often wonder why any software vendor would enter the Linux market for anything other than command line tools that use nothing more than C89: it seems to me to be a recipe to be yelled at about matters that have no reasonable solution, by people who believe that asking money for the software or support services is akin to theft, and that failure to have 0 day implementations for every known or custom distribution is apparently considered akin to theft too. (Heck, people rag on Mathworks for not having a free implementation that will run on the Linux port to Arduino Uno... which only has 32K memory.)

Lots of interesting things have been done on Linux systems, but it is a harsh market to do software business in.