matlab-support linux package

Suprisingly lot of MATLAB users on Linux using and activelly recommanding the matlab-support linux package.

Home page: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/matlab-support

See attached description:

--------------------- description-----------------------------
This package does not provide MATLAB. Instead, it configures an
existing MATLAB installation to integrate more comfortably in
a Debian installation.
Currently it provides /usr/bin/matlab through the alternatives
system, offers to work around incompatibilities between the libraries
bundled with MATLAB and system libraries, and provides a helper
utility meant to be used by other packages to compile MEX extensions.
Install this if you would like your MATLAB installation to behave more
like an ordinary Debian package. Other packages may depend on
this one if they install MATLAB code, for example in order to
compile MEX extensions.

I would like to know what exactly provide and what modification perform this package with MATLAB installation and Linux system settings. Any, more detailed info, regarding matlab-support package is not available!

Is that package recommanded by MATLAB community as a safe and reliable extension of MATLAB on Linux platform?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

[Saman Ghannadzadeh]

You can see what this package does by looking at the source code at https://salsa.debian.org/debian/matlab-support

It:

• Creates an application menu for MATLAB (i.e. in your KDE/Gnome/MATE menus)
• Using the Debian alternatives system, creates symlinks for various components in /usr/bin (e.g. /usr/bin/matlab, /usr/bin/matlab-mex, ...)
• MATLAB ships with quite a few shared libraries, however your Linux system will already have those. So the package renames the MATLAB provided ones (by adding .bak to their file name). This then forces MATLAB to use the system provided libraries instead. This is good because those libraries are regularly maintained and updated by your distributions package manager.

Although highly unlikely, switching to the system libraries could lead to problems as MATLAB might have shipped with a slightly different version of those libraries. If MATLAB calls a function that is defined differentely in these two versions then there could be a problem. However this is highly unlikely as these libraries (e.g. libstdc++) are very mature and so have a very stable and well-defined ABI that don't change across minor versions.

Here is the list of libraries:

$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libgcc_s.so.1
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libstdc++.so.6
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libgfortran.so.5
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnx86/libquadmath.so.0
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libgcc_s.so.1
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libgfortran.so.5
$matlab_path/sys/os/glnxa64/libquadmath.so.0
$matlab_path/bin/glnxa64/libvulkan.so.1
$matlab_path/bin/glnxa64/libfreetype.so.6

[FWDekker]

The reason matlab-support makes MATLAB use system libraries instead of bundled libraries is not because the former are better maintained, but because the latter regularly cause major bugs due to system incompatibilities. For example, without renaming these libraries, I am completely unable to launch MATLAB.

[Wouter Verstraelen]

Hi @Saman Ghannadzadeh and @FWDekker, any idea how to make this package point to a new version of MATLAB? I've been using 2020b for a while with matlab-support, now installed 2024b in the same default usr/local/MATLAB directory, but matlab-support keeps on starting the 2020b version, even if I try to remove and reinstall it

[Michal]

From my point of view, is using of the "matlab-support" package on supported (!!!) Linux distributions completely useless or non-recommended in general.

Moreover, there is no detailed description of the package functionality. There is no simple way how to restore default MATLAB configuration and how to use "matlab-support" on MATLAB multi-version setup.

This package is a hack-like solution without any guarantee of functionality and reliable (!!!) default state restoration.

[Wouter Verstraelen]

@Michal I just appreciate the simplicity of opening matlab by clicking an icon instead of through a terminal. Plus indeed, I seem to remember that there were some complications regarding compatibilities that got solved through this package

[Wouter Verstraelen]

Okay, seems that the trick is in the /etc/matlab/debconf file