Installing CPLEX (educational version) on Linux

IBM recently made the full, size-unlimited version of several OR tools, including CPLEX, freely available to educators who join its Academic Initiative.  Once you've joined, you just surf to https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/software/get_software.html, click Download from the software catalog, sign in (if you have not already) and use the search feature to locate CPLEX (or whichever program you want).  Along with a couple of Windows installers, there's an omnibus archive file for Unix that contains 32 and  64 bit versions for several Unix and Linux distributions.  You download a license file separately from https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/support/ilog.html (but do not need to install the license manager program, just the license file).  They also make some courseware available.  It's a sweet deal!

Installation on Linux is pretty easy: extract the archive appropriate to your particular OS and architecture, unpack it somewhere, and park the license file someplace you can find it.  (Details are spelled out in a Quick Start guide.) That leaves the question of how you're going to run the interactive optimizer.

I decided to use a mix of two approaches on my systems, which run Linux Mint (which shares most of its plumbing with Ubuntu).  One approach was to create a run.sh file in the CPLEX installation directory.  The contents were pretty simple:

#!/bin/bash
export ILOG_LICENSE_FILE=<absolute_path_to_file>/access.ilm
<absolute_path_to_binary>/cplex

I ran chmod +x run.sh in a terminal to make it executable, then added it to Mint's main menu (mint-menu) by right-clicking the menu, selecting Edit menu, selecting an appropriate submenu, clicking New item, making the type Application in Terminal, and making the command /run.sh. Clicking this runs the interactive optimizer in a terminal window that closes automatically when I exit CPLEX.

It's also handy to be able to run the interactive optimizer from an arbitrary directory (so that I don't have to type in paths when I load files). Mint provides a convenient Open in Terminal command as part of the context menu for the file browser. (This can be added to Ubuntu by creating a shell script for it.) To make CPLEX available anywhere, in any terminal  window, I created a .bash_profile file in my home directory (since I didn't already have one) and added the following lines:

export ILOG_LICENSE_FILE=<absolute_path>/access.ilm
alias cplex=<absolute_path>/cplex

Technically I think the alias command might belong in .bashrc (which I also didn't have) rather than .bash_profile, but it works there, and why create two files if I only need one? So now I can run CPLEX's interactive optimizer in any directory.