Running MATLAB from off-campus

You can run MATLAB from off-campus in a terminal window, with some reasonble warnings and restrictions. Read this document completely before deciding whether to bother. I'm assuming that you already know how to:

Use ssh
Print a file which is in your UMD home directory.

(I apologize in advance that I'm not going to go into depth about these two things.)

Assuming you do, first open an ssh connection to terpconnect.umd.edu and log in with your default UMD DirectoryID and Password. Note that on linux or a Mac you can open a terminal window and just ssh terpconnect.umd.edu. Depending on your system you might instead need to ssh -X terpconnect.umd.edu to enable X-forwarding or ssh -Y terpconnect.umd.edu to enable trusted X-forwarding.

Once you've done that you'll have a terminal window. Begin with

tap matlab

and then

matlab -nodisplay

Note: This runs MATLAB without opening any fancy displays. Note that you cannot plot or even access any standard windows menus this way. Consequently you'll need to know how to save your session as you go. You do this using the diary filename command. Do this before starting the project.

>> diary matlab1.txt

Everything you do from here on will be saved to the file matlab1.txt in whatever directory you ran MATLAB from.

Now you can do the project! At the end just quit.

>> quit

At this point the file matlab1.txt will contain the contents of the session. You may need to sftp or scp it out in order to print it from where you are. If you know how to ssh then this probably makes sense.

Note: If you skip the matlab -nodisplay command you'll get all the fancy windows and graphics but it...will...run...very...slowly. You have been warned!