Mathematica 7 Qt style

Mon Mar 29 22:58:06 CEST 2010

Mathematica had a rather ugly looking user interface on Ubuntu Karmic 64bit, but it was all right on a Gentoo 32bit system. I don't know the reason for this, but I managed to improve the situation on Ubuntu. I forced mathematica to use the system Qt libraries and specified the Qt style in the mathematica launcher script.

$MATHEMATICA refers to the installation directory, for me this was /usr/local/Mathematica7.0. Also, this applies to a 64bit system, but I am quite sure it works for 32bit systems with the obvious modifications.

cd $MATHEMATICA/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64
sudo chmod a-r *Qt*
sudo chmod a-x Qt-Plugins

This will disable the Qt libraries supplied by Wolfram, falling back to the system Qt libraries.

Next edit the file $MATHEMATICA/Executables/mathematica:

$MATHEMATICA/Executables/mathematica

# Setup QT Plugin path
QT_PLUGIN_PATH="${M_LIBRARY_PATH}/Qt-Plugins:$QT_PLUGIN_PATH"
#QT_PLUGIN_PATH="${M_LIBRARY_PATH}/Qt-Plugins"
...
"${MathematicaFE}" -topDirectory "${TopDirectory}" -style QtCurve "$@"
#"${MathematicaFE}" -topDirectory "${TopDirectory}" "$@"

This will select the QtCurve style, but you can select any other available Qt style here. The Oxygen style did not render nicely on my system, though. You can also change it on the fly by invoking mathematica as

mathematica -style GTK+

Posted by Raimar | Permanent link | File under: gnu_linux, mathematica