Running Matlab in Awesome

Today I tried to run Matlab R2012a 64bit under Awesome, but I only got gray windows. After googling around, I found that X window integration in most modern Java virtual machine displays gray windows when used with non-re-parenting window manager such as Awesome. According to this post, Sun  JVM 7 shows this symptom for some Java applications, while OpenJDK may work. So I changed the Matlab Java directory to point to OpenJDK's jre and it works.

export MATLAB_JAVA="/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre"

To run Matlab from command line, use:

matlab -desktop

To check the environment variables used by Matlab, use:

matlab -n

I found the solution from this forum post.