Trouble installing 2014a on Mavericks

I have upgraded to Mavericks.

When trying to install 2014a, I get an error.

The installer makes it through login to Mathwork, selecting the license (a TAH if that makes a difference) it verifies the license but after asking for the installation path, the products to install, when I hit the install button almost immediately it says:

The application encountered an unexpected error and needs to close. You may want to try re-installing your product(s). More information can be found at /var/folders/7_/q1v63_1s55b09v3x90rkr0ym0000gn/T/mathworks_areeda.log

The relevant information from the log file is:

Statistics Toolbox 9.0 Symbolic Math Toolbox 6.0

(Mar 22, 2014 19:14:39) java.lang.NullPointerException at com.mathworks.install.ComponentSizeAggregator.add(ComponentSizeAggregator.java:13) at com.mathworks.install.ProductInstallerImpl.downloadProducts(ProductInstallerImpl.java:96)

There is plenty of disk space, I've tried with the Mac JDK 8 and the latest Oracle (7.51). I've downloaded several times and the md5 sum matches. I downloaded and installed it on a mt. lion imac and scientic linux and every thing in fine on the other systems.

I've run out of ideas and would appreciate any suggestions.

Thanks, Joe

[Walter Roberson]

It is not just Mavericks.

On OS-X Mountain Lion, I had the beta version of R2014a installed, and went to install real R2014a. Everything seemed to go okay until I went to launch the program, at which point I promptly got a crash. So I deleted the entire directory and went to install from scratch. Now I get the above error, same as you, almost immediately after it starts installing. Re down-loading the installer did not help.

[Walter Roberson]

I went over to java.com and grabbed the latest, but installing it did not help.

[Malcolm Lidierth]

Got something similar (with Mavericks) so I reduced the toolboxes to:

MATLAB, Curve Fitting Toolbox,Signal Processing Toolbox, Statistics Toolbox

and all is fine.

The issue may be with specific toolboxes - but I didn't investigate.

[Joseph Areeda]

Thanks for the comments.

Walter: I did get 2014a to install on Mt. Lion with all the toolboxes. I did have a similar issue with NetBeans that I was able to resolve by specifying which JDK to use.

Malcolm: I think you're onto something. I'll go try a minimal subset of toolboxes, the University license has many that I don't use.

I suspect it's the Java version but I haven't figured out how to override the Apple installation with Oracle's.

I'll report back.

Edit: Well my problems seems to be a bit different. Just choosing Matlab still fails with the same error.

[Malcolm Lidierth]

Joseph MATLAB is bundled with Java 7 on the Mac from R2013b onwards. Not sure if MATLAB_JAVA has any affect (as on Windows). I have 6, 7 and 8 on my Mac. Default at install was 8. MATLAB runs with the bundled version by default.

Check java -version at the system terminal. I guess there could be an issue if the installer is using 6.

Sounds like an issue for TMW support.

Answer 1

[the cyclist]

I am guessing you had the 2014a prerelease version downloaded. You need to delete the old version from both the Applications directory and the Downloads directory (which I can infer from you message is probably /Users/areeda/Downloads).

I don't think this is related to the Java/Retina/font/rendering issues that the latest versions of MATLAB have.

[Joseph Areeda]

Thank you Cyclist,

That seems to have done the trick, at least it is now downloading 2014a.

I did have the prerelease version installed and had deleted it from Applications. I emptied ~/Downloads of all Mathworks files and it is at least going further than it did yesterday.

It never occurred to me that an old installer not being used might be the problem. How did you spot it?

I'll report back when the installer completes.

Best, Joe

[Joseph Areeda]

Thanks again.

That worked.

Joe

[the cyclist]

Glad it worked. Frankly, I am not 100% sure how I thought to check Downloads as well as Applications. Like you, I had been poking around Answers and other support links (to solve both the Retina display issue, and then this one), and it just popped into my head.

[John D'Errico]

Good that I saw this. I was just going to download the new release, but my habit is to leave the old one installed until I get the new one working, and I am running the beta.

[Walter Roberson]

Deleting the pre-release did not work for me. I have cleaned it out of /Applications and out of Downloads but no go.

java -version does report 1.6 for me.

[the cyclist]

Hm. Maybe the Java issue is interrelated. I did follow the instruction in this answer before the installation. I have 1.7.

[Malcolm Lidierth]

The MATLAB installer uses Java so this may be an issue with your system running Java 6 during the installation. Changing to Java 7 as the default might help. Check bash profile to see if it has links to 6.

As I recall, simply installing Java 7 from the Oracle download site should set it as the default unless that is overrided manually.

For the installation step only, just renaming the System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jre/jdk - or something like that (I am not on a mac at present) - might be enough (possibly???) to stop the Apple Java 6 distro being used. Oracle Java 7/8 should be in the /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines folder.

Otherwise, manually running the jnlp installer from a terminal giving a full path to java might be OK.

[Walter Roberson]

I moved System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ aside and specifically installed Java 8 Runtime from Oracle, but it did not make any difference, I still get the same error.

[Malcolm Lidierth]

@Walter

Then I am at a loss. I have a working installation on Mavericks as described above.

It is just possible (but unlikely) that the system default Java was v7 at the time of the install a couple of weeks ago (in which case it could have been u51 or the u60 early access as I have both on the system).

Sorry not to be more helpful.

ML

[Walter Roberson]

I think I just tracked this to there being a Mathworks directory in my Downloads directory, that the installer had loaded files into, including from R2014a pre-release. Once I trashed that, I was able to proceed with the download and install on Yosemite. I had, per the cyclist, removed the pre-release installer, but I did not look before for the possibility that files from that former install were in some other directory.