Slice plot causes MATLAB crash

I wanted to redo some figures that I made for a paper (doi:10.1021/la3001575) to illustrate some slices for a talk. For the original figures, I extrapolated the data and plotted them using slice(). Now I own a new laptop running Linux Mint 13 (Kernel 3.2.0-23) and MATLAB R2013a. When I rework my former procedure it works fine until I want to create the figure. It causes MATLAB to crash. The same happens when I just follow the example from the "slice" help. MATLAB crashes when attempting to draw the figure. What could be the reasons for this? Where should I look into for debugging? Some MATLAB settings, Java version, any other packages?

Thanks, Holger

Answer 1

[Shashank Prasanna]

This may be an OpenGL issue. To confirm, try the following:

Restart MATLAB and before you run anything run:

>> opengl software

and then run the slice example. Does that crash MATLAB?

Answer 2

[Holger]

Woohoo! Works. Thanks a lot. Actually, when setting opengl back to harware I get "Warning: Switching to hardware OpenGL rendering at runtime on unix is not supported. > In opengl at 98" Seems I have to avoid hardware acceleration or are there any workarounds?

[Shashank Prasanna]

[Please reply in the comment section and not as a seperate answer, this will make answers and replies hard to track, thanks.]

That's the reason I asked you to run opengl software just when you launch matlab and not during. you can change it during runtime. I don't have much to offer at this point because there is a lot involved in debugging this issue which may stem from your graphics card driver, make model, linux kernel etc. I would recommend contacting Technical Support if you have SMS for further assistance. Or avoiding OpenGL altogether but reverting to software in startup.m file.

[Sean de Wolski]

Likely this is a bug in your graphics driver. You can always try updating them, that may or may not fix the issue.