How do I display the splash screen on Linux?

This might seem trivial. I am running MATLAB on an old office computer, running Linux Mint, that has MATLAB 2018 installed on it. The hardware is pretty old so it runs slow and takes forever to boot. On top of that it does not show any splash screen so for the first couple of times I thought it wasnt running, so I tried launching it again and again. I looked through the command line options:

1. -nosplash
2. -display Xdisplay
3. -nodisplay

I looked through the downloads directory and found the splash image in resources/coreui/matlab/splash.png. Is there a way I can tell matlab to launch with the splash screen. I tried the following but it didnt work because there seems to be no such -splash option. Is there a way this can be done?

matlab -splash resources/coreui/matlab/splash.png

Answer 1

[Hans Scharler]

Great question... I looked in the doc for startup options on Linux: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_env/start-matlab-on-linux-platforms.html and some info on the startup file: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlablinux.html#buqncoe

Let me know if this gets you any closer.

[Shovnik Paul]

I tried looking into those documents but none helped. The startup file (2nd link) does not mention the splash feature. I used the matlabroot command mentioned in the first link to locate the installation directory and it said /usr/local/MATLAB/R2018a in which I found the libmwsplashscreen.so liibrary file which I think might be the cause of the issue but I might be wrong. Is there some way to modify the matlab script so when starting it creates a splash screen (with pictures from /resouces/coreui/matlab) and kills it as soon as MATLAB has loaded ?

I realize that I might be overthinking this small (and extremely niche) issue but it would be nice to find a solution!

[Shovnik Paul]

Hi, I am writing this as an update: I figured it out: the issue was with freefonts: the splash screen loader probably could not find compatible default fonts to overlay on the image and skipped it entirely (my guess: I could be wrong).

The fix: I cd'd into the MATLAB installation folder /usr/local/MATLAB/R2018a/bin/glnx64/, created a folder called exclude and then moved all libfreetype* files into it.