Fixing Matlab errors in Ubuntu 12.10

I recently installed Ubuntu 12.10 in my system and found that the upgrade a lot of my system. A reasonable number of fixes were simple but some of them were very annoying. In this post I just wanted to discuss two specific errors I faced and how to fix them.

I use the student version of Matlab (32 bit) on a 64 bit machine. As part of upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 , the installer removed multiple 32 bit files which caused the issue. When I tried to run Matlab , I got the following errors :

~/matlab/bin/matlab: 1: ~/matlab/bin/util/oscheck.sh: /lib/libc.so.6: not found

~/matlab/bin/glnx86/MATLAB: error while loading shared libraries: libXpm.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The first error is mostly harmless – I will describe how to fix it later in the blog post. Fixing the first error needed to install 386 (32bit) version of few packages. Of course, fixing one exposed the next error and so on. In the interest of time, I will put all the packages in the single command.

sudo apt-get install libxpm4:i386 libxmu6:i386 libxp6:i386

Running the above command worked and allowed Matlab to run. However, I then faced another issue – when I tried to save a plot, it was failing again with the following error : (fixing first caused the second)

MATLAB:dispatcher:loadLibrary Can’t load ‘~/matlab/bin/glnx86/libmwdastudio.so’: libXfixes.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
??? Error while evaluating uipushtool ClickedCallback

MATLAB:dispatcher:loadLibrary Can’t load ‘~/matlab/bin/glnx86/libmwdastudio.so’: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
??? Error while evaluating uipushtool ClickedCallback

 

To fix this, run the following command :

sudo apt-get install libxfixes3:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386

Finally, to fix the innocuous error :

~matlab/bin/matlab: 1: /home/neo/gLingua/matlab/bin/util/oscheck.sh: /lib/libc.so.6: not found

do the following :

sudo ln -s /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc-2.15.so /lib/libc.so.6

Of course, make sure the libc-2.xx.so version is the correct one before running this command.

 

Hope this post helped !

How to get shareable link for an entire folder within Public folder on Dropbox

As part of my research, I collaborate and share datasets with fellow researchers. These datasets are usually huge and hence cannot be shared via email. Since I started using Dropbox, I felt it to be a convenient mechanism t share them.

The workflow I came up with was very simple. Create a folder inside my Dropbox public folder, put the dataset in it and share the link with my friends. Sounds simple enough. Although in practice I hit a snag.

I was surprised to find that I was not able to get a shareable link for folders within Public folder. For any other folder in my Dropbox, I was able to right click and get  a shareable link. Long story short, the way to enable it is very simple. You just need to visit this site :

https://www.dropbox.com/enable_shmodel

 

Now you can right click on any folder (either using the client or in Web UI) to get the shareable link. An interesting side effect was that I was able to get the shareable link for any file/folder in my Dropbox folder. That’s right – I was able to share a folder that was not in my Public folder. This is a bit surprising but could be useful someday nevertheless.