Comment 7 for bug 1293876

As noted in #1294116, this crash occurs when plotting using the fltk plotting toolkit, which is now the default with Octave 3.8. Plotting with fltk requires an X environment with working OpenGL support, for some definition of "working". A sufficient workaround for this crash is to use the gnuplot toolkit instead, which was the default in previous versions of Octave.

This can be achieved by issuing the command

  graphics_toolkit gnuplot

at the Octave prompt. This can also be added to ~/.octaverc to make this preference effective every time Octave is started.

I have been able to reproduce this bug in a 14.04 beta VM running Unity.