Why do I receive an error message "archive is not a ZIP archive" during MATLAB installation on Linux?

During MATLAB installation I receive a message similar to:

ERROR: The following error was detected while installing /home/<username>/mathworks_downloads/R2011b/archives/glnxa64/MATLAB_Compiler416_glnxa64.zip:

archive is not a ZIP archive

Would you like to retry installing /home/<username>/mathworks_downloads/R2011b/archives/glnxa64/MATLAB_Compiler416_glnxa64.zip?  If you press No, the installer will exit without completing the installation.  More information can be found at /tmp/mathworks_<username>.log

I have attempted to redownload the referenced archive but the error persists. I can manually extract the zip archive without error. The referenced log file contains details similar to the following:

ERROR: java.util.zip.ZipException: archive is not a ZIP archive
at org.apache.commons.compress.archivers.zip.ZipFile.positionAtCentralDirectory(ZipFile.java:468)
at org.apache.commons.compress.archivers.zip.ZipFile.populateFromCentralDirectory(ZipFile.java:309)
at org.apache.commons.compress.archivers.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:181)
at org.apache.commons.compress.archivers.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:158)
at org.apache.commons.compress.archivers.zip.ZipFile.(ZipFile.java:119)
at com.mathworks.install.archive.zip.commonscompress.CopyInputStreamToTempZipFileExtractor.extract(CopyInputStreamToTempZipFileExtractor.java:43)
at com.mathworks.install.archive.DecodeArchiveInputStreamExtractor.extract(DecodeArchiveInputStreamExtractor.java:33)
at com.mathworks.install.input.ArchiveComponentSource.extract(ArchiveComponentSource.java:27)
at com.mathworks.install.ComponentContainerImpl$InstallableComponentImpl.install(ComponentContainerImpl.java:219)
at com.mathworks.install.ComponentInstallerImpl.installComponents(ComponentInstallerImpl.java:110)
at com.mathworks.install.ComponentInstallerImpl.installComponents(ComponentInstallerImpl.java:66)
...

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This error can occur when there is not enough space in the /tmp directory to contain the product archive during extraction. Increasing the space available within the /tmp directory will resolve this error.

[Walter Roberson]

Michael Bernard: see http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/312197-why-do-i-get-the-error-message-that-says-error-installing-third-party-software-mingw-4-9-2-core#answer_243279

[Walter Roberson]

@QiQin Zhan

It depends how many of the toolboxes you are installing. If you were to install everything then you might need as much as 34 gigabytes of temporary space.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

In current MATLAB versions, a downloader is used that downloads archives as required; when using the downloader, the error just might occur if you ran out of disk space during the download (but more common in that case would be an error about the magic number not matching.) With older releases, there was no downloader program. Back then you would download a setup program, and you would download a series of archives. The archives were zip files, but it was important to not expand the zip. However, some people have their browsers configured to automatically expand zip files; that automatic expansion needs to be turned off while downloading the individual installation archives.