Why does MATLAB R2018a display erroneous message on Ubuntu 16.04?

Why does MATLAB R2018a display the following erroneous message on Ubuntu 16.04?

MATLAB is selecting SOFTWARE OPENGL rendering.
/usr/local/MATLAB/R2018a/bin/glnxa64/MATLAB: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version
`GLIBCXX_3.4.22' not found (required by /usr/local/MATLAB/R2018a/bin/glnxa64/libCppMicroServices.so.3.1.1)

I followed the classic installation instructions and I also installed matlab-support.

Answer 1

[ziyu wang]

Try these commands, you need to upgrade your libstdc++6 version. If first command can't run, just run other three. I hope it can help you.

 %code
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-4.9
sudo apt-get upgrade libstdc++6

[david sarria]

Thanks. Worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04 with R2018a.

[Álvaro Bátrez]

Me too.

[bin yan]

Thank you. Your method works well.

[Vicente Tiznado]

Thanks. It also worked for me in Ubuntu 16.04 using MATLAB R2018a

[Matthew Wycliff]

You da man Ziyu Wang! Before executing the steps that you listed, I also did this:

 $ sudo apt-get install matlab-gdb.

I don't know if that step was completely necessary, but I got it working now thanks to you. Cheers!

[Deep]

I tried these steps for Matlab R2018b and it stops after displaying MATLAB is selecting SOFTWARE OPENGL rendering. Any solutions?

Thanks!

[Ming-Feng Ho]

Thanks. It works for me so far. I am using MATLAB R2019a on Ubuntu through MATLAB-AWS-reference-architecture. (https://github.com/mathworks-ref-arch/matlab-on-aws)

Answer 2

[Ariel Surya Boiardi]

Hello, this thread is pretty old, but looking for the error on google is found, so I post my solution in the hope of helping someone out.

I had a similar issue when running gmsh from matlab

>> system('gmsh -save -format m trapezoid.msh')

my error string was

gmsh: /usr/local/MATLAB/R2020a/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.26' not found (required by /lib64/libgmsh.so.4.5)
gmsh: /usr/local/MATLAB/R2020a/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.26' not found (required by /lib64/libTKBRep.so.7)
gmsh: /usr/local/MATLAB/R2020a/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.26' not found (required by /lib64/libTKMath.so.7)
gmsh: /usr/local/MATLAB/R2020a/sys/os/glnxa64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.26' not found (required by /lib64/libTKCDF.so.7)

To my understanding this is ome of the MANY problems of MATLAB on Linux due to the fact that matlab ships outdated copies of core libraries is its folders and tries to take priority over the system libraries.

It seems to me (maybe i broke something else) that these problems are solved by masking the offending library, in this instance

cd /usr/local/MATLAB/R2020a/sys/os/glnxa64/
sudo rename 'libstdc++' 'deact.libstdc++' *

Of course it is possible to mask the library in many ways, but it is better not to remove it completely (you never know).

I really hope Mathworks will start using system libraries insted of custom ones one day.

[Kenneth Dyson]

Sorry, I am not familiar with the 'rename' command.

What are you accomplishing with that code?

When I run it I get:

Can't modify constant item in postincrement (++) at (user-supplied code), near "libstdc++"

I am running MATLAB R2020a on Ubuntu 20.04

[Ariel Surya Boiardi]

I am not very expert either, but I think rename simply looks for the first string in the filenames speficied by the last string (in my case * for all files in the current dir) and substitutes the matched string with the second string.

You might want to be using

sudo mv 'libstdc++' 'deact.libstdc++'

but I did not test this solution, so please make a copy of the original file bofore running!