Why are you so crazy, Linux? A friend asked me to look at why his installation of Matlab + code for the ImageNet 2010 competition on his VMWare Linux box wasn’t working. I logged on and typed in matlab, but got “matlab: command not found”, which was strange because he said he had installed it. Doing a “locate matlab” told me matlab was in /usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin so I executed
PATH=/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin:$PATHexport PATHmatlab
That worked as I got a nice Matlab splashscreen, but then it just crashed printing out a cryptic “Opening log file: /home/usr/java.lgo.11195” message. That log file had the error “Could not reserve enough space for object heap”, which sounded suspiciously like not enough memory. Sure enough, only 384 MB of RAM were allocated to the VMWare virtual machine. Change that and reboot.
And of course by then, my local export PATH command was invalid so I added the following line to /etc/profile:
PATH=/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin:/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin/utils/mex; ^^^ DON'T DO THIS!!!
Reboot and I can’t even log in. Ctrl + Alt + F1 to get to command console and massive amounts of errors later I found out that bleck, I overwrote all the other PATH variables too. Now I have to /usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/nano /etc/profile and change the line to include the old path as well.
PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin:/usr/bin/MATHWORKS_R2008B/bin/utils/mexexport PATH
Whew, now matlab starts up and we can execute mex. Except now matlab keeps whining about “cannot write to preference file “matlab.prf” in “/home/user/.matlab/R2008b/. A quick google search says we need to execute
sudo chown user /home/user/.matlab/R2008b/matlab.prfsudo chmod a+w /home/user/.matlab -R
That first one might be redundant, but there are several files matlab needs to edit and the first command only solves the first problem.
Running the make file resulted in “/usr/bin/ld: cannot find-lstdc++” which is interesting. Not entirely sure what was going on, I decided to do a sanity check and wrote a nice hello_world.cpp program and tried compiling it with g++ only to discover g++ wasn’t installed. Install g++, do another sudo ldconfig for good measure, and bam it all compiles nicely. However, running make from the feature directory whined about u_int32_t in item.hpp, so a quick “typedef unsigned int u_int32_t;” in item.hpp later, g++ is complaining about not being able to link to -lvl. Turns out their Makefile needed to be pointed to ./3rd-party/vlfeat/bin/glx and then things are happy.
Whew! Finally, we can run their example script: extract_bow.sh. Alas still no luck, all sorts of complaining going on. The first is “./vldsift: error while loading shared libraries: libvl.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory” Bleck! Adding the directory that libvl.so is in to /etc/ld.so.conf seemed to work and the demo program ran.
Sigh…Linux, why are you so crazy? Or maybe the better question is: you guys who programmed Linux, why are you so crazy?