MATLAB: Do I receive a crash related to “QFontEngineFT”

macmacintoshsimulink

Under some circumstances, when working in Simulink, Stateflow, or MATLAB, I receive a crash with the following stack trace:
 Segmentation violation detected on GUI thread. 
 Configuration: 
   MATLAB Version:   7.4.0.287 (R2007a) 
   MATLAB License:   unknown 
   Operating System: Linux 2.6.22.8-mw017 #1 SMP Tue Sep 25 13:15:57 EDT 2007 x86_64 
   GNU C Library:    2.3.6 stable 
   Virtual Machine:  Java 1.5.0_04 with Sun Microsystems Inc. Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM mixed mode 
   Default Charset:  US-ASCII 
 Register State: 
   rax = 000000000238b0b0   rbx = 0000000002263bd0 
   rcx = 0000000000000000   rdx = 0000000000000030 
   rbp = 0000000002263a70   rsi = 0000000002263bd0 
   rdi = 00002af32bd81888   rsp = 0000000042915ea0 
    r8 = 0000000000000000    r9 = 0000000000080000 
   r10 = 0000000000000003   r11 = 00002aab08077b80 
   r12 = 00002aab0756f240   r13 = 0000000042915ec0 
   r14 = 000000002bd818b8   r15 = 0000000002263ac0 
   rip = 00002aab071bcbd9   flg = 0000000000010246 
 Stack Trace: 
   [0] libQtGui.so.4:QFontEngineFT::QFontEngineFT(_FcPattern*, QFontDef const&, int)~(0x02262d10, 0x2aab06e6d300, 0x402428f5c28f5c29, 0x320500010000000e) + 1785 bytes 
 Please follow these steps to report this problem to MathWorks so we have the 
 <snip>
Occasionally MATLAB will instead abruptly exit without any stack trace.

Best Answer

This can occur as a result of a version incompatibility between the Qt libraries that are used by some MATLAB and Simulink components, and the FreeType libraries.
This should not occur with MATLAB R2008a or later releases, but can potentially occur on earlier versions that are run on Linux or OS X. It is more likely to occur when running an older version of MATLAB on a newer computer.
The problem can be resolved by using the appropriate FreeType libraries. In particular, MATLAB R2007a and R2007b will require libfreetype.so.6.3.7.
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