Why do I receive a warning message about GLIBC incompatibility when I start MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a) or newer on a system with glibc 2.3.4?

When starting MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a) or MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b) on a Linux machine with glibc 2.3.4 such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, I receive the following warning message:

ERROR: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Warning: glibc 2.3.4      - Unsupported version
          glibc 2.3.6      - MATLAB built using this version
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-> Your configuration APPEARS to be too OLD to run this MATLAB program!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    For system requirements consult http://www.mathworks.com ...

***************************************************************************

MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a) also prompts me to continue:

ERROR: -> Best to quit by pressing <return> at the next prompt ...

    Do you still want to try to continue? (y/[n]) >

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a) and newer were built using glibc 2.3.6 and thus expect to be run on a machine with glibc 2.3.6. However, there are some distributions of Linux with glibc 2.3.4 that are supported for use with MATLAB (Red Hat Enterprise 4 is one example). See the system requirements page for the complete list here:

https://www.mathworks.com/support/requirements/previous-releases.html

MATLAB will give a message regarding the glibc version discrepancy and provide a prompt to continue in order to start MATLAB. To bypass that prompt, replace oscheck.sh with the updated version attached below. This file is located in:

$MATLABROOT/bin/util/oscheck.sh 

(where $MATLABROOT is the MATLAB root directory). Once replaced, MATLAB will still warn on startup, but it will not prompt the user to continue.

MATLAB R2010a and newer versions are not expected to run with glibc 2.3.4:

https://www.mathworks.com/support/requirements/matlab-system-requirements.html