[Matlab-emacs-discuss] matlab-shell not working due to unknown TERM

[David E. <de...@ra...>]

Hello all,

since I just spend an hour with this, I think it might be good to post
my experiences here.

I just migrated from Matlab 7.4 to 7.6 at work (I know, I'm pretty
conservative), and Emacs matlab-shell was no longer working on certain
GNU/Linux machines. It would just abort with the typical

"1 assert/signal failures have occurred; MATLAB will abort in 10 seconds."

I know this error usually arises when trying to use MATLAB on a non-SSE2
machine, but this was not the case here.

After some digging, I found that the cause was that on those machines
there was no terminfo for 'emacs'. You can test this by running Matlab
with a non-existing TERM like

TERM=foobar matlab -nodesktop -nosplash

I tested this with different MATLAB versions on one of our machines, and
there 7.4 and 7.9 ran fine with this TERM variable, while 7.6 aborted.

For getting Matlab 7.6 to start in matlab-shell, you can either use

(setq system-uses-terminfo t)

as a workaround, or you provide a terminfo entry for emacs. On my Ubuntu
machines, I just did

mkdir /etc/terminfo/e
ln -s /usr/share/terminfo/d/dumb /etc/terminfo/e/emacs

which will make 'emacs' an alias for 'dumb'.

-David