"The Live Editor is unable to run in the current system configuration" error message when starting Live Editor on Ubuntu 17.04+

When I open Live Editor in MATLAB on my Ubuntu 17.04 system, a message pops up saying "The Live Editor is unable to run in the current system configuration", and I am unable to use the Live Editor. Why is this happening? How can I fix it?  

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This is a bug in MATLAB R2017b (and later) that affects Ubuntu 17.04 (and later). Since the release of Ubuntu 17.04, the libgconf-2.so.4 library does not get installed unless it was already on the system prior to an upgrade. However, this library is needed by the Live Editor in order to run. 

As a workaround, run the following command in the terminal to install the missing library: 

 

sudo apt-get install libgconf2-4

Two other workarounds to try on an Ubuntu 24.04 machine (currently known in MATLAB R2024a) are:

1) Remove libstdc++.so.6 from the MATLAB R2024a area. It may also need to be removed from a MATLAB user's own ~/.MathWorks/ directory tree.

or

2) Set the env variable LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 when invoking MATLAB, which will hopefully force the system to prefer the system libstdc++.so.6 over the MATLAB copy.

[Mika Mäki]

This answer worked on Kubuntu 19.04 with MATLAB R2019a, although the package name is a bit different:

sudo apt install libgconf-2-4

However, the typing latency problem described here still hasn't been fixed, and it makes the live editor nearly unusable.

[CARLOS RIASCOS]

thank you