Walking Randomly

When installing MATLAB 2011a on Linux you may encounter a huge error message than begins with

Preparing installation files ...
Installing ...
Exception in thread "main" com.google.inject.ProvisionException: Guice provision
 errors:

1) Error in custom provider, java.lang.RuntimeException: java.lang.reflect.Invoc
ationTargetException
  at com.mathworks.wizard.WizardModule.provideDisplayProperties(WizardModule.jav
a:61)
  while locating com.mathworks.instutil.DisplayProperties
  at com.mathworks.wizard.ui.components.ComponentsModule.providePaintStrategy(Co
mponentsModule.java:72)
  while locating com.mathworks.wizard.ui.components.PaintStrategy
    for parameter 4 at com.mathworks.wizard.ui.components.SwingComponentFactoryI
mpl.(SwingComponentFactoryImpl.java:109)
  while locating com.mathworks.wizard.ui.components.SwingComponentFactoryImpl
  while locating com.mathworks.wizard.ui.components.SwingComponentFactory
    for parameter 1 at com.mathworks.wizard.ui.WizardUIImpl.(WizardUIImpl.
java:64)
  while locating com.mathworks.wizard.ui.WizardUIImpl
  while locating com.mathworks.wizard.ui.WizardUI annotated with @com.google.inj
ect.name.Named(value=BaseWizardUI)

This is because you haven’t mounted the installation disk with the correct permissions. The fix is to run the following command as root.

mount -o remount,exec /media/MATHWORKS_R2011A/

Assuming, of course, that /media/MATHWORKS_R2011A/ is your mount point. Hope this helps someone out there.

Update: 7th April 2014
A Debian 7.4 user had this exact problem but the above command didn’t work. We got the following

mount -o remount,exec /media/cdrom0

mount: cannot remount block device /dev/sr0 read-write, is write-protected

The fix was to modify the command slightly:

mount -o remount,exec,ro /media/cdrom0