Documentation and Live Editor shows black screen on Linux

Hello,

I'm struggling with the following problem : the documentation shows only a black screen, as you can see in the attached picture. I also noticed the same thing for the live editor, though I don't use it.

I've tried the following :

• Changing the renderer (source) :

com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HtmlComponentFactory.setDefaultType('HTMLRENDERER');

The documentation now displays OK but unformatted which is not very eye-candy. The Live Editor is still black.

• Installing missing library (source) :

Running,

ldd ~/.matlab/$MATLABVERSION/HtmlPanel/glnxa64/chromium/jxbrowser-chromium | grep -i found

I found that I was missing the deprecated libgconf library, that I installed. The return of the previous command is now empty but the problem is the same.

• Reverting to the default renderer :

com.mathworks.mlwidgets.html.HtmlComponentFactory.setDefaultType(' ');

The problem persists.

My computer is running Manjaro Linux with KDE. Java is installed through jre-openjdk (up to date, version 12.0.2). MATLAB version is R2019a.

I'd like to try a few things before trying the full reinstallation of MATLAB, so I'm all ears.

Cheers,

Guillaume

[Joshitha R]

I'm a Manjaro Linux user as well.

I faced the same problem and got my solution at https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/487200-matab-help-window-is-just-a-black-screen?s_tid=srchtitle

I was installing a few other packages and l guess I lost some other files which fix the black screen issue.

Reinstalling libselinux and libsepol doesn't help anymore.

Any idea what are the additional packages I may require?

[Guillaume Le Goc]

I do have a problem also, related to another package. I think MATLAB wants to use its own rather than the system's and somehow it breaks documentation and so on.

What's the error message displayed when launching MATLAB from a terminal ? Mine is related to pango, like here. There is a solution but it didn't work, even though I didn't dig into it.

I also came across this on Arch forums, but I didn't test yet.

[Joshitha R]

Yep, my error is also related to pango:

/usr/local/MATLAB/R2019b/bin/glnxa64/jcef_helper: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_ptr_array_copy

The fix given in the first link doesn't help (I also don't know how to go about the 'relinking' mentioned in one of the 2 answers)

Have no idea on how to work out the solution given here as well:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/MATLAB#Addon_manager_not_working

[Joshitha R]

FOUND A FIX!!

the error that was actually thrown to me was:

/usr/local/MATLAB/R2019b/bin/glnxa64/jcef_helper: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libpango-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_ptr_array_copy

I followed this reddit thread

these are the commands I used:

mkdir $Matlab_root/cefclient/sys/os/glnxa64/0_excluded
mv $Matlab_root/cefclient/sys/os/glnxa64/libg* $Matlab_root/cefclient/sys/os/glnxa64/0_excluded

I can now view my Documentation window and the Live scripts

[Guillaume Le Goc]

Yay that worked !

Basically it's the solution proposed in the Matlab Answers post we mentionned but moving all libg related libraries.

Cheers !

Answer 1

[Guillaume Le Goc]

The problem appeared again on MATLAB R2019b. I also noticed that the "Log in" button didn't work, while outputing the libselinux library was missing . Installing SELinux library solved all the problems (black screen on doc & livescripts and the Log in button).

[Harisanker Pradeep]

This worked for me. Here's the link to the libselinux aur repo -> https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libselinux/

Answer 2

[Chidvi Modala]

You can find answer to a similar question here

https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/100622-why-does-matlab-start-with-a-blank-grey-window-when-using-a-compiz-or-beryl-window-manager

[Guillaume Le Goc]

I didn't want to disable all desktop effects (there are many in KDE...). Oddly, reinstalling MATLAB fixed the problem. Not sure what happened there.