Hardware Acceleration in Linux

Dear Community,

I'm running debian wheezy on a Thinkpad T420 and have Matlab 2012b installed. I had some issues with hardware acceleration before, which I couldn't really resolve, but it worked somehow (sluggish, though). The problems got worse, and now, whenever I start Matlab, my Gnome desktop environment sort of crashes, the statusbar on top disappears, I can't Alt+Tab through windows anymore and all of it looks a bit dodgy. The programs still work though. When I then kill gnome and log in again, I only get the 2D non-accelerated version of my desktop, so I assume the 3D acceleration somehow crashed. I searched the web and this support page, and could find similar issues, but not something that would help me. I'm thankful for any hints or checks I could carry out to make MATLAB work as expected. It has been suggested to use 'opengl software', but this doesn't work for me (see below for more details).

Best wishes Daniel

[Daniel Shub]

Have you tried a different window manager/desktop environment? Are you using open source or proprietary video drivers? Is openGL working outside MATLAB?

Answer 1

[Daniel]

Thank you to everybody who read this question. After I updated to R2013a all the problems vanished, so I don't need any more answers on this.

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

If you give the MATLAB command

opengl software

then does the problem still appear ?

[Daniel]

Thank you very much for your answer. I tried that command before, but sometimes the problem occurs already on startup. If it doesn't, and I issue 'opengl software', it may go fine for a while but eventually breaks as well. When I just tried it, it broke on opening a file in the editor.

Daniel