HKU MATLAB

• HKU Matlab license

Students may install MATLAB on their personal computers. Licenses must be activated online for each computer, this typically uses the MAC address of an ethernet interface.

Offline or commandline installation

The normal installer requires both an internet connection and a GUI interface. So offline or headless installations, like on a hpc node, require an extra step: obtaining install files. Previously used install files may be found under the /home/utility/ folder in the GPU Cluster.

If your desired MATLAB version is not available on the server, HKU license administrators may be contacted to provide install ISO files (see table below). Alternatively, designated departmental IT support staff (such as our department IT executive Alice) may download an ISO from Distribution Software under Site Licenses Coordinated by ITS

FirstName	LastName	email
Lilian	Chan	lilianyl@hku.hk
Grace	Cheung	graceclc@hku.hk
Bonnie	Lau	bonlauwl@hku.hk
Li Yuet	Li	ymli@hku.hk

If you requested and received new install files, please put a copy into /home/utility/ for the other users.

Detailed script-based installation

See https://www.mathworks.com/help/install/ug/install-noninteractively-silent-installation.html and https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_env/start-matlab-on-linux-platforms.html

Step 1

mkdir iso && sudo mount matlab_R2020a_Linux.iso ./iso/ -o loop will mount the install files in a newly created folder "iso".

• by default the iso folder is read-only, so you can't add files to that folder.
• if sudo privilege is not available, extract the files from the iso manually (e.g. using 7zip).
• These iso files seem to include the installer script, so there was no need to download the linux installer from Mathworks. Upon inspection the web installer constitutes a subset of the iso files, but there are minor file size differences.

Step 2

Copy the installer_template.txt to a new file, e.g. ~/copiedconfig, and input the required information:

• including the File Installation Key generated from the Mathworks HKU license page. It is a long string of digits.
• ensure the target installation folder is writable by your user, e.g. ~/MATLAB, not /MATLAB.

Then from the iso directory run ./install -inputFile </path/to/copiedconfig> (no sudo/root required)