Why does MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b) crash when using the MESH command over an X connection?

I run the code below on a remote MATLAB session:

[x,y,z] = peaks;

for i = 1:20

       close all;

       figure;

       mesh(x,y,z);

       drawnow;

end;

The MATLAB session always crashes and disappears after a few iterations. Here is the crash dump:

   Operating System: Linux 2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jul 23 03:56:11 EDT 2008 x86_64

   Processor ID:     x86 Family 15 Model 1 Stepping 3, AuthenticAMD

   Host Name:        dav-dhcp-157-136.CE.Berkeley.EDU

 X connection to :0.0 host broken (explicit kill or server shutdown)

I have tried switching the renderer to ZBUFFER, but that does not help either.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This seems to be an issue with using OPENGL or ZBUFFER with the X server. By default, the MESH command uses the OPENGL renderer which causes crashes in this situation.

A workaround is to set the renderer to PAINTERS immediately before calling the MESH command by using the following command:

set(gcf,'renderer','painters')

Another workaround is to force MATLAB to use the software version of OpenGL. This can be done by executing the following command:

opengl software

Note that Macintosh systems do not support software OpenGL.