I recently tried installing the Wavelet Toolbox add-on in MATLAB R2025a on Ubuntu, and I kept running into this annoying error:

There was an error while installing product files.
archive_write_header(): Failed to create dir ‘/home/<user>/MATLAB_2025/resources/…’

MATLAB told me the install directory was writable, but the installer still failed every single time.

Turns out the problem wasn’t MATLAB itself — it was Linux file permissions.
When I first installed MATLAB, I used sudo, which meant parts of the installation ended up owned by root.

So when MATLAB (running as my normal user) tried to add files, it hit a wall. It simply didn’t have permission.

I checked the permissions of the resources folder:

ls -ld ~/MATLAB_2025/resources

See that root root? That means the folder belongs to the root user, not me.

drwxr-xr-x 308 root root 12288 Jun 5 10:20 /home/myuser/MATLAB_2025/resources

The Fix (Super Simple)

All I had to do was change the ownership of my MATLAB installation back to me:

sudo chown -R myuser:myuser ~/MATLAB_2025