Getting Matlab 2008b+ to work with Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Being the nerd that I am, I pre-ordered Snow Leopard as soon as I could and also installed it on the same day it shipped. I did a complete reformat of my HD to get rid of all the junk I accumulated during the Leopard days. Much to my dismay, Matlab 2008b did not install properly because the Activation App wouldn’t work. I read the error logs and checked out some discussion on the mathworks website and determined it was a Java bug. Snow Leopard only comes with Java 6 and is 64-bit by default. Matlab, however, is written for Java 5 and 32-bit at that.
To get it to activate properly, navigate to /Applications/Utilities/ and launch “Java Preferences.app”.
Drag the 32-bit version of Java 6 to the top of both lists. Then, activate Matlab manually without using the internet (you’ll have to provide a license file). After the activation is successful, you can switch the Java back to 64-bit with no problems and launch Matlab normally. There is an exception thrown on launch, but I ran plenty of old scripts and even tried fdatool and whatnot with no problems.
Sweet.