On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 02:28:25PM +0200, Christian Thiemann wrote:
Hi guys,
I switched to Xmonad recently, after looking into wmii and dwm, and I am quite happy with it :)
However, I tried starting up MATLAB today and it displays a huge gray screen. I thought it crashed during startup but when I clicked on where the menu bar should be, the menus actually open and are displayed properly. But everything else just doesn't draw in the MATLAB window. Does anybody has an idea what the problem might be (and/or give me hints how to provide some more useful information)?
It looks like it's a problem with Xmonad. I fired up an Xnest with fvwm and MATLAB works fine there. And Xnest with wmii and MATLAB works as well.
Is the MATLAB gui written in Java? There is a known bug in the Java windowing code which prevents it from working correctly with non-reparenting window managers like xmonad. Fortunately, there is a workaround in the Java code which makes things work again, as long as the current window manager it Compiz or Looking Glass 3D. One of the contrib modules (XMonadContrib.SetWMName) fiddles the X-property settings so that xmonad pretends to be LG3d; the author claims that this makes Java programs work correctly. Stefan