I've talked with an administrator at the UMich labs, and he said he was able to reproduce the problem on linux machines (which run a Redhat 7.2 derivative) with nvidia binary drivers when trying to connect to SUN machines.
(bash-2.05$ uname -a SunOS and.engin.umich.edu 5.8 Generic_108528-15 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10) He added, though, that connecting to other linux machines and running matlab works fine. I'm using a GeForce2MX, and the available versions of matlab on university systems are: 4.2, 5.3.1, 6.1, and 6.5, all of which I have tried and don't work. --Greg
