[16714] in Athena Bugs
Re: MATLAB 5.2 (Case 130941)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Abby Fox)
Wed Feb 17 17:19:59 1999
To: norstadt@MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU, 3partysw@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[16615] in bugs" "[593] in 3partysw"
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 17:19:52 EST
From: Abby Fox <ajfox@MIT.EDU>
Hello, Till.
You sent in a bug report a while back about using the Matlab 5.2 IDE
from various Win95 X servers:
>After I OK the dialog, the edit window starts coming up, and then my X
>server crashes. Although this would seem like a bug in the X server, I
>have tried this on X-Win32 4.1, MIX Server 5.6, and X-WinPro 5.0, and they
>all crash. Any help would be appreciated, since I would like to be able to
>use MATLAB from my dorm.
This isn't something we support per se, but we took a quick look and
it does seem to be a problem on the X server end. We first tried
running matlab under MI/X on a few different platforms, with varying
results. In the best case under Win95, everything seemed to work
(including graphing and demos) except the IDE. By contrast, one of my
coworkers who uses the commercial product Hummingbird Exceed was able
to bring up the IDE. Generally, you can expect to run into some font
issues if you're trying to run unix software in this fashion, and some
of the commercial ones simply do a better job on it.
There are a couple of things you might want to do if you're playing
with different servers. First, you can blow away the ~/.windu
directory matlab creates between your tests (it stores various IDE
options there, and they advise this on their tech support pages for
dealing with various IDE bugs). Second, if the server crashes, you
may find a bunch of leftover processes that didn't exit gracefully and
should be killed:
ps -ef | grep matlab
ps -ef | grep windu
More generally, I wanted to be sure you're clear on two things:
First, the IDE is a pretty recent addition to the unix version of
matlab. In previous versions, the "edit" command would just bring up
emacs (or whatever editor you have set in your .environment). You can
always edit your .m files outside of matlab in a text editor, or you
can disable the IDE (so that matlab's edit function instead brings up
your usual text editor) by using the following Xresources:
! Built-in Editor and Graphical Debugger options
*preloadIDE: Off
*builtInEditor: Off
*graphicalDebugger: Off
*externalEditorCommand: $EDITOR $FILE &
Second, you mentioend using athena-x, so I just wanted to make sure
you're aware of the other options. You can run matlab remotely on the
regular dialups in cases where you're just doing calculations and
don't need the graphics; this would be a good deal faster than using
athena-x and a PC X server. If you chose to install Linux-Athena or
NetBSD-Athena on your PC, you could run Athena software such as matlab
directly, rather than over a remote login.
Good luck,
Abby Fox
Academic Computing
