OS X MATLAB install error

Context

• The OSX release is older than 10.10 (Yosemite)
• The Mac running OS X has a version of the 1.7 (or later) Java Development Kit (JDK) or Java Runtime Engine (JRE)
• The MATLAB version is R2013a or older
• The user has created a MathWorks account and associated with the MIT license
• The user has selected "Install using the Internet"

Problems

• The installer download appears to start, but then nothing happens.
• On activation, the user gets an error message: "The application could not connect to MathWorks. Please make sure your internet connection is available and that all software and hardware firewalls have been disabled before retrying your request."

(One or both of these problems may happen independently.)

Answer

• Make sure you have the latest 1.6 JDK installed and set as the default version (it's possible to have multiple Java versions installed at the same time). To verify this type javac -version in a Terminal window; the command should return something similar to javac 1.6.0_xx where xx is a minor version number like 65. If the number following javac is not 1.6.0, see the next section below.

• Proceed with the installation instructions from MathWorks.

Information from MathWorks

• To make 1.6 the default Java version, create a file containing the following two lines:

setenv JAVA_VERSION 1.6
setenv JAVA_HOME /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home

Name the file launchd.conf and then move it to /etc. This only needs to be used for installation/activation. Once installed, if you want to use a different JDK version, simply delete this file from /etc. Note: You need to reboot the machine after saving this file or deleting it.

• The latest MATLAB release (R2013b) supplies its own Java version at runtime, which is currently Java 7 (this is the Java version used when MATLAB runs, not the version needed at install time). Older MATLAB releases will use the OS-provided Java version on Macs. Users can override this by setting the MATLAB_JAVA environment variable (Check here for details), but use of Java 7 or later on MATLAB releases prior to R2013b is not guaranteed to work correctly.

Notes

• Here is a fairly detailed article about Java versions used by MATLAB.

• Mac MATLAB users still having Java-related problems when installing MATLAB should contact MathWorks Technical Support, and reference license number 650662.

See Also

• MATLAB Landing Page