Mathematica font bug in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

May 22nd, 2008 | Categories: math software, mathematica | Tags:

I recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation from 7.10 to 8.04 and almost immediately ran into problems when trying to run Mathematica 6.0.2 – all of the fonts are not rendering properly. In addition, if I run mathematica from a console window I get error messages like

X Error of failed request: RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)
Major opcode of failed request: 158 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 7 (RenderFreePicture)
Picture id in failed request: 0x440189f
Serial number of failed request: 69419
Current serial number in output stream: 69420

X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 158 (RENDER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Serial number of failed request: 71071
Current serial number in output stream: 71074

The following screenshot shows the problem – you cannot see anything you type apart from a few symbols such as [] and {} .

Other people have come across this problem and workarounds have been identified. The first is to run Mathematica from a console prompt as follows

mathematica -defaultvisual

This allows you to see what you are doing but is a big ugly. Another workaround is to install libqt4-core and libqt4-gui by doing

sudo apt-get install libqt4-core libqt4-gui

and then rename a couple of files in the Mathematica distribution as follows

sudo mv /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux/libQtCore.so.4 /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux/libQtCore.so.4.old

sudo mv /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux/libQtGui.so.4 /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux/libQtGui.so.4.old

This fixes the problem but you may get two extra blank windows appear when you run Mathematica. To fix this open up the Option Inspector in Mathematica as follows:

Edit-> Preferences and click on Open Option Inspector

When in the Option Inspector click on Notebook Options and then Window Properties and change the WindowFrame option from “Normal” to “Generic” then click on Apply

A big thank you to the people in this thread on launchpad.net for developing all of these workarounds. I will be reporting these problems to Wolfram’s tech support as soon as I have finished writing this.

Update: 28 May 2008

Someone from Wolfram responded to these issues in this thread. For anyone who has googled themselves here I have copied and pasted his response below:

Note – this is not an “official” Wolfram response, I just wanted to let you all know we’re aware of the issues…

With that in mind, a few comments:

The original error messages are due to X11 providing an incorrect visual buffer to draw on – the ‘export XLIB_SKIP_ARBG_VISUALS=1′ command tells X to discard any composite visuals (which is what compiz and the like uses to do window effects) when we request a new visual. The reason we are getting a bad visual is complicated, but should be resolved by the next major release of Mathematica.

The extra windows are supposed to be hidden, and will go back into hiding with 6.0.3 (coming very soon).

The font rendering issues are related to Hardy’s lack of some fonts we normally assume to be installed by default, namely a decent Courier and Times fonts. Some adjustments were made for 6.0.3, but if these do not resolve your issues, you may want to adjust the substitution rules (Option Inspector->Global Options->Menu Settings->FontSubstitutions) to point to fonts installed on your system.

On deleting/replacing libQt* – this is not recommended, as we ship a commercial version of the Qt library, which can potentially differ from the open source version. If it works for now, that’s fortunate, but I would not consider that a permanent fix. We will be updating our shipping version of Qt with our next major release, most likely from the Qt 4 .3 version tree, as 4.4 is causing some compatibility issues (the above mentioned QObject warnings)

  1. Jon
    May 28th, 2008 at 22:39
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Re-check the thread – some of your workarounds are less than ideal, and some are resolved for the next version of Mathematica (6.0.3)

  2. admin
    May 29th, 2008 at 10:54
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Thanks Jon.

  3. zeke
    July 15th, 2008 at 18:22
    Reply | Quote | #3

    Thank you very much. Worked great for me

  4. hscot
    July 17th, 2008 at 19:24
    Reply | Quote | #4

    Thats! This worked like a charm!

  5. yuri
    July 21st, 2008 at 23:35
    Reply | Quote | #5

    Very good!, thank.

  6. September 3rd, 2008 at 14:12
    Reply | Quote | #6

    3Q very much.
    In my machine I don’t need the following steps:
    “This fixes the problem but you may get two extra blank windows appear when you run Mathematica. To fix this open up the Option Inspector in Mathematica as follows:

    Edit-> Preferences and click on Open Option Inspector

    When in the Option Inspector click on Notebook Options and then Window Properties and change the WindowFrame option from “Normal” to “Generic” then click on Apply”

  7. fuburike
    October 5th, 2008 at 05:28
    Reply | Quote | #7

    thanksssssssss!!!!!!worked perfectly!!!!!

  8. Francisco
    November 17th, 2008 at 09:24
    Reply | Quote | #8

    Almost all is well, except that i can’t access documentation center, well, i can but doesn’t work appropriately. I cant put any item in the search bar.

    Thanks in advance.

  9. Francisco
    November 17th, 2008 at 17:38
    Reply | Quote | #9

    I found the answer in, http://pennsylvania.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?p=6015689.
    “as spectacular as it may sound, the frozen searchbar is caused by numlock. Disable it to be able to type”.

  10. Juan luna
    February 1st, 2009 at 17:23

    Thanks for your help ! I just updated my system from ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 and Mathematica was terrible.
    I was able to find the updates to 6.0.3 and they worked just fine with my Mathematica 6.0.
    here is the link:
    http://support.wolfram.com/technotes/updatesforubuntu.html
    and the text in the link:
    ——————————————————————————
    Mathematica 6.0.3 updates for Ubuntu Hardy/SUSE 10.3

    Some users have reported problems when starting/using the Mathematica 6.0.3 FrontEnd on SUSE 10.3 or Ubuntu Hardy (8.0.4). This happens because there is a conflict between libQT libraries provided by Mathematica with user installed or system QTlib. The following upgrade to the FrontEnd libraries updates the QT libraries in the Mathematica installation and updates the start up scripts to be compatible with the font systems on these distributions. To update, please follow the instructions below:
    1.

    Download the update
    2.

    cd /path/to/Wolfram/Mathematica/6.0.3/
    3.

    sudo tar xzf /path/to/6.0.3_update.tar.gz
    —————————————————————————

  11. arcnewuss
    February 11th, 2009 at 11:16

    Why is my ‘option inspector’ greyed out???

  12. sourcerror
    July 25th, 2009 at 14:57

    “Why is my ‘option inspector’ greyed out???”

    Same problem for me.