Empty tooltips in MATLAB

Question

I am running MATLAB R2013b. Under Unity, the built-in editor of MATLAB shows empty tooltips, as seen here:

Under XFCE, the tooltips are showing up just fine.

My system: Ubuntu 14.04, Intel i7 4770K.

The question has already been posted somewhere else (here and here), but I think this is a Unity-specific problem. Any ideas?

Answer 1

There is a bug report at MathWorks for this specific bug. In the bug report, there are 2 workarounds proposed:

• wmname workaround:

  1. Install wmname by running sudo apt install suckless-tools
  2. Run wmname LG3D in the terminal
  3. Run matlab & to start MATLAB

• _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING workaround:

  1. Run export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 in the terminal
  2. Run matlab & to start MATLAB