MATLAB with Beryl on Ubuntu 6.10

A few days ago I mentioned that I’m now neck deep in Linux and loving it. Specifically however I mentioned that I had a little trouble getting MATLAB to display properly. When I initially launched MATLAB I would see a blank white window. I could access the file, edit, view, etc… commands via my keyboard and they would render fine but the main window was blank. This ended up being a problem with MATLAB’s java based rendering and Beryl.

I’ve gotten a few questions about how I fixed it so rather than let everyone else struggle here’s a quick fix. Make a shell script in your /MATLAB/bin/ directory with the following contents:

export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit
PathToMATLAB/MATLAB/bin/./matlab

Replace “PathToMATLAB” with the actual path on your specific machine and save it (min is named LaunchMATALB.sh). Chmod this file to be executable. Now when you run this script in a terminal MATLAB should render correctly. If you want to add this script to your gnome panel (I run gnome under Beryl) simply right click on the panel and select “Add to Panel.” Then select custom application launcher and browse to the script. Be sure to change the type field to “Run in Terminal.” Hopefully this has solved some problems. I am running Beryl on nvidia drivers and I’d love to hear if this solution works with ATI cards with either AIGLX or XGL. Post any ATI info in the comments.

Now maybe I should look into installing Mathematica (though I’m starting to think MATLAB trumps it).