To generate an activation signature unique to each machine, MATLAB needs to locate a unique ID for the machine. On Linux machines, each flavor of Linux has its own place for identifying the machine, so matlab has used the alternative route of using the hardware address of the primary Ethernet adapter, assuming the network adapter is named "eth0".

Newer versions of Linux, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and related systems (CentOS, Fedora) adopted a new Consistent Network Device Naming (CNDN) convention, which gets device names from the BIOS. On these systems, the network adapters may not be named "eth0", "eth1", etc. If the hardware supports CNDN, network adapters on the motherboard will be named "em1", "em2", ... through a lookup of the BIOSDEVNAME, using a driver package of the same name. Hardware known to support this includes newer Dell PowerEdge systems.

For more information concerning the issue, you can visit http://linux.dell.com/files/presentations/Red_Hat_Summit_2011/Campground.pdf

The most straightforward method is to remove the biosdevname package, either through the system's Add/Remove Software tool, from the command line or during installation. On Red Hat, CentOS & Fedora the package can be removed with yum remove biosdevname.

Alternately, one can start the Linux kernel with the option, biosdevname=0, while installing Linux or starting the Linux kernel with the same line.

On most systems, including RHEL, CentOS, and Ubuntu, one can permanently change the kernal boot parameters by editing the file /boot/grub/menu.1st, which is usually a soft link to /boot/grub/grub.conf.

For RHEL 6 and CentOS 6 users, MATLAB's document is Solution ID 1-EUTG50:
https://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-EUTG50/index.html?solution=1-EUTG50

For earlier releases of RHEL and other versions of Linux, MATLAB's document is Solution ID 1-661QJD:
https://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-661QJD/index.html?solution=1-661QJD