Matlab 2016b command window not refreshing under Ubuntu 16.04

So I got this very very strange behavior. Whenever I ran something in a script which loops and prints stuff, for some reason the Matlab Command Window display buffer does not get cleared, and essentially with each new line appearing all of the text gets rewritten on top of the previous one. I know this sounds quite confusing so I'm attaching a screenshot. The behaviour is present whenever I'm "focused" on the command window. If I press or focus the folder structure it clears again.

PS: Also it does seem to happen after some initial number of iterations of printing.

Does anyone know what might be causing this and how to fix it potentially?

[Walter Roberson]

Which graphics driver are you using?

I see messy output under two circumstances:

1. running MATLAB in Linux under Parallels (virtual machine) for Mac, in which case I am limited to the graphics capabilities of the virtual machine
2. running sufficiently old versions of MATLAB directly on Mac under OS-X El Capitan (and really, it is more the installers that are the problem rather than MATLAB itself.)

[Aleksandar Botev]

Thanks for the fast reply. I'm running Matlab 2016b under Ubuntu 16.04. However, (I guess this might be the issue) I have an AMD R9 Nano graphic card with the amdgpu-pro proprietary driver provided by AMD. One thing I recently noticed is by starting Matlab in terminal the following error seems to get printed:

Xlib: extension "AMDGPU" missing on display ":0".

[Walter Roberson]

There does not seem to be much information about that message; I only see http://askubuntu.com/questions/891434/ubuntu-16-04-and-amdgpu-pro-driver

I speculate that it is a driver issue.

Answer 1

[Cumhur Erkan Tuncali]

I have the same issue on a Dell Vostro laptop with Ubuntu 16.04, Matlab r2017a.

I mostly experience this on the command window. As soon as I click on the title bar of the command window as I want to change its location, it refreshes.

My GPUs:

• GeForce GT 525M
• 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller

Answer 2

[Theodore Golfinopoulos]

I also encounter this issue frequently - the picture below is from a Matlab 2017a instance on an Ubuntu 16.04 installation. I've also seen it in Matlab 2016 versions, also on Ubuntu 16.04. The machine is a NUC; I've also seen the same behavior on Dell 70xx series.

The same issue is reported in

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/276859-text-not-refreshed-when-scrolling-in-command-window-and-editor

where a user reported the issue on Matlab 2018a on Ubuntu 18.04.

May be a software OpenGL issue.

[Theodore Golfinopoulos]

Here is the same phenomenon in Matlab 2015b on Ubuntu 18.04 running on an Intel NUC running 3.0 Mesa 18.0.5 OpenGL. So the issue extends beyond software OpenGL use cases.

And here, on Matlab 2017b on Ubuntu 18.04 running on a Dell 70xx series desktop, I think running software OpenGL.

Answer 3

[Theodore Golfinopoulos]

See this bug fix

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/313333-command-window-corruption-bug-in-linux

It seems to be a Java issue. A temporary fix is the clearscreen command; a more permanent fix is pointing a MATLAB_JAVA environment variable to your system's jre. Details below.

The clearscreen command

clc

ends the glitch temporarily, but it will come back; to get rid of the problem, export a MATLAB_JAVA environment variable in your .bashrc and point it to the Java runtime environment on your system - for me, this looked like

export MATLAB_JAVA=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre

The test code mentioned here https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/313333-command-window-corruption-bug-in-linux

for i=1:1000,'x',drawnow('update'),pause(0.0001),end

works to figure out (a) whether you have this issue (i.e. it reproduces the problem), and (b) whether you've fixed it.

What a relief!