MatLab - add it to your start menu

1. Open a terminal and at the prompt type, gmenu which will open the Gnome menu editor.
2. Right click on "User Menus"
3. In the Name box, type: MatLab
4. In the Comment box, type: MatLab
5. In the Command box, type: exec xterm -iconic -e /usr/local/bin/matlab &
6. Press the apply button
7. Press the OK button

Why do we use this above command in line 5? Because MatLab cannot run without a TTY. When MatLab is started from the Start Menu, a TTY is not available to MatLab. To avoid this problem, we need the Start Menu to create an xterm and then run MatLab from within that xterm. To do this, we give the command: exec xterm -iconic -e /usr/local/bin/matlab & where /usr/local/bin/matlab is the path to the MatLab R12 root directory.