maple -cw

died without any error message.

the solution was the installation of a few ancient X11 fonts:

---> Package xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi.noarch 0:7.5-4.fc15 will be installed
---> Package xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-1-75dpi.noarch 0:7.5-4.fc15 will be installed
---> Package xorg-x11-fonts-ISO8859-2-75dpi.noarch 0:7.5-4.fc15 will be installed

maybe they are missing from the default Ubuntu install as well

Thanks again!

My quick-and-dirty workaround has been

1) a link to the systems own libstdc++.so library

# pwd
/opt/maple15/bin.IBM_INTEL_LINUX
#
# ll libstdc++.so.*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 1203643 aug   16 14.18 libstdc++.so.2.9
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root      28 dec   10 19.18 libstdc++.so.6 -> /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.16
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 1173539 aug   16 14.18 libstdc++.so.6.0.9
#

2) NOT uncomment these lines

# In order to link to MATLAB from within Maple, correct the following path
# and uncomment the next four lines, or define the environment variable,

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
# $MATLAB_BASEDIR outside this script.
# if [ -z "$MATLAB_BASEDIR" ] ; then
#MATLAB_BASEDIR=/opt/matlab7
#export MATLAB_BASEDIR
# fi

because it created (almost) all the havoc.

After these 2 hacks links open with firefox/konqueror/chrome without any problem,

system("/usr/bin/firefox") etc. works as expected.