Why does MATLAB start with no display on Mac with MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b)?

I get the following message when starting MATLAB:

 Last login: .....

 Welcom to Darwin!

 wsmac:~ username1$ su username2

 Password:

 wsmac:/Users/username1 username2$ /Applications/MATLAB73/bin/matlab

 -----------------------------

 You (username2) are not logged in to the Mac console (user username1

 is logged in to the console), and you are not the root user. The Java

 virtual machine will be started without a display. Use -nojvm if you do not

 want to start the Java virtual machine.

 -----------------------------

After this MATLAB starts up in the terminal window. When I go on and create and submit a distributed computing job or use timer objects, I get an error as you can see below.

jm = findResource(...);

job = createJob(jm);

createTask(job, @sum, 1, {[1 1]});

createTask(job, @sum, 1, {[2 2]});

createTask(job, @sum, 1, {[3 3]});

submit(job);

waitForState(job,'finished',60)

 ??? Error using ==> timer.timer

 The timer objects require Java AWT support.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This error message is caused by one of the following reasons:

1) You should always start MATLAB from the XTerm (X11) and not from the terminal on Macs. This is a general rule and applies to MATLAB as well as MATLAB Distributed Computing Engine (MDCE).

2) To switch the user using 'su' and then starting MATLAB always results in MATLAB starting in no display mode which causes some Java functionality to be disabled in MATLAB. You need to log in as the user under which you want to use MATLAB and not use 'su' to this user. In the case of distributed computing this Java error causes the WAITFORSTATE function to crash because Java support is required to create timer objects.