System freezes when managing graphical windows

[Alexis Espinosa]

I'm an intensive user of MATLAB.
I was using MATLAB R2010b with 10.10 and later with Ubuntu 11.04. I did that for a long time.
But a month ago I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 12.10 and my MATLAB scripts began to crash and freeze the whole system. I was not able to open console sessions with ctrl-alt-f1 .. f6 so the only solution was to restart. This happened everyday.

A week ago I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 13.04 and I also installed a later version of MATLAB: R2013a. But the problems persisted. I installed the app: matlab-support but this did not help. Indeed, I was about to downgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 again, but I foundt the Software&Updates->AdditionalDrivers option. Then, I decided to change the driver of
NVIDIA G84GL [Quadro FX 1700] to:
VDPAU library from nvidia-310 (proprietary, tested)

This driver seems to be working better (No crashes today) but still need to test. Anyway, it is clearly working better than the default (from nouveau).

Another small issue that was solved is the text of the path in the title of the console window: when the console window is set to a small size, then the path does not fit in the title section and it is cut off. But with the original dirver the cut looks awful (it looks like the rest of the text is stacked up in the last section looking terrible. With the nvidia-310 driver this bad looking is not happening and the text is being cut off beautifully!

This report is for you to check the compatibility of the default driver which seems to be failing.

Thanks a lot for Ubuntu. It is a great operating system!