Can I run Matlab at home?
Running Matlab on Your Home Machine UMN students can buy a student copy of Mathwork’s Matlab software for about $90. If you’re just starting with matlab scripting, you might try installing Octave. Octave is similar to Matlab and is a free download, but doesn’t have the high end toolkits. Running Matlab on a Remote Machine From Home To run matlab on a remote machine, you’ll need an ssh client to run matlab from the command line, and XServer software to run matlab GUI desktop. Mac OS X comes with an Xserver application and ssh and so does Linux. Windows users will need an ssh client like PuTTY or the OpenSSH included in Cygwin. Cygwin also includes an XServer, but PuTTY users need to install X-Win32 to do X-forwarding. PuTTY and Cygwin are free, X-Win32 is about $115 for an educational license. Once you have ssh and an X Server installed, run “ssh -Y birch.math.umn.edu” to log in to a host named birch. Older versions of ssh use the “-X” option instead of “-Y”. After logging into birch, s
