Maple 11 and Matlab R2007a under Ubuntu 7.10 64bit

You'd think companies like Mathworks and Waterloo Maple could at least afford to test their products on the most common Linux distros. But obviously they do not...

Installation instructions for Matlab R2007a (Vienna UT student version): Create a directory for Matlab, copy the license.dat into this directory and run the install executable from the dvd. The first two steps did of course work flawless, but

sudo /media/cdrom/install

only returned "Permission denied".  Running

sudo sh /media/cdrom/install

also failed with a similar error. What did work, was coping the whole DVD to a temporary directory on the hard disk and running the install script from there. The installer even created symlinks in /usr/local/bin. Then Matlab did start and mostly work, but is did not display any menus when Compiz (Desktop Effects) is enabled. Google pointed me to this solution:

ln -s [matlabroot]/sys/java/jre/glnxa64/jre1.5.0/lib/amd64/motif21 [matlabroot]/sys/java/jre/glnxa64/jre1.5.0/lib/amd64/motif12

and start matlab with

AWT_TOOLKIT=3DMToolkit matlab

So I created /usr/local/bin/matlab with

#!/bin/sh
AWT_TOOLKIT=3DMToolkit [matlabroot]/bin/matlab

and core matlab now works fine. Only starting Simulink results in a segmentation fault, but I do not need that anyway.

Maple 11 (again Vienna UT student version) installation worked much better. I had anticipated to need workarounds like for the 10 and 9.5 versions, but simply running

sudo sh /media/cdrom/installMapleLinux64

worked. It did not create any symlinks though. But xmaple only displayed an empty window! This is again a compiz related problem and creating a similar start script as for Matlab worked.