Segmentation violation when drawing figure in MATLAB2012

Hello fellow Matlabers,

We need to use Matlab2012b because a toolbox we use is only supported in that version. Unfortunately Matlab crashes as soon as we start to draw anything in 'figure'. The attached file shows a crash dump that we got after:

> figure
> plot(1.2, 1.3)

The issue can be reproduced on Centos7 and Ubuntu 20.04 (all with the latest patches) and has been seen on multiple computers.

We did not see the issue, when we use Display-Forwarding though.

Everything we tried so far did only lead to the same error.

We tried to contact Mathworks about this issue, but it seems that Mathworks does not support these old versions anymore.

Did anybody enounter this as well and has a solutiion?

Thank you very much in advance.

Answer 1

[Ganesh]

Hi @Matthias Weyl,

The issue might be occuring within Linux due to missing font libraries that MATLAB requires. As the issue occurs on older versions of MATLAB, first check that the Linux OS is supported for the MATLAB version currently being used: https://www.mathworks.com/support/requirements/previous-releases.html

If the OS is not supported, MathWorks Technical Support is limited in the amount of assistance to provide on the issue.

However, the following investigative steps can be performed to resolve the crash:

1. Narrow down if the crash is a result of the Linux OS version by verifying if the crash (such as opening any ".fig" files) is reproducible on other Linux or Windows environments. 
2. Upgrade to a more recent MATLAB version
3. Upgrade the Linux OS
4. Install any missing fonts in the OS. Existing fonts can be checked by using the ‘listfonts’ command

A workaround to avoid the crash can be setting the following in the "startup.m" file: 

>> set(0,'DefaultTextInterpreter','none');

This will avoid using the default 'tex' text interpreter upon MATLAB startup.