Support for Java applications

[Koen]

i reinstalled my netbook with ubuntu10.10 netbook remix
i need to use tuxguitar, and the unity interface screws up the menu's ( file, edit, ect.. ) making whole tuxguitar useless.
according to this post: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9951110 it also is a problem for more java-based apps.

for me it is a reason the switch back to 10.04, but before i do that, i will provide the help i can give.

[Leo Arias (elopio)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in unity.

When reporting bugs in the future please use apport by using 'ubuntu-bug' and the name of the package affected. You can learn more about this functionality at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs.

[David Barth (dbarth)]

This is an appmenu related issue. And java apps are usually not supported unless they use the native GTK toolkit.

In this case, the solution is to disable appmenu for the application you need to start:
(from the command line)

$ UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= tuxguitar (or whatever the application name is)

To permanently disable appmenu for tuxguitar, the easiest way is probably to unset the UBUNTU_MENUPROXY env. variable directly in the wrapper script that is used to start the java application itself.

[Koen (gorgabal)]

@David Barth

thank you very much,that was very usefull information. now i can still use ubuntu 10.10

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

David, saying that java applications are not supported and that users need to export a variable manually is not a solution, that needs to be addressed correctly

[David Barth (dbarth)]

Ultimately this is a bug in the menu items interceptor code that translates menuitems calls into their dbusmenu equivalents.
I've looked quickly into the SWT code and they really seem to be doing "normal" calls to the GTK menu system, albeit using a lot of dynamic updates to push menus.

It would be worth using a sample SWT program as a test case to improve the robustness of the dbusmenu-gtk code.

[David Barth (dbarth)]

I've heard of patches for SWT support on #ayatana though. Ted: can you investigate with Cody?

And just a note if all else fails, that dl_iterate_phdr function can be used to inspect the symbol table at runtime and could help blacklist apps linked with an SWT lib at runtime.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I think this is a dup of bug 618587? I attached a test case file there.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

FWIW, this bug seems to be about *all* Java apps, while #618587, which this bug is marked as a dup of, is specifically about Eclipse (or SWT apps).

Does anyone have an idea whether the work going into supporting SWT will benefit Swing apps (e.g. NetBeans) as well? Should I submit a separate bug about that?

[Jesse Glick (jesse-glick)]

I doubt that changes made for SWT would be useful for Swing-based apps, so a separate bug report would be in order. See http://youtrack.jetbrains.net/issue/IDEA-69424 for example. Potentially the Swing L&F could detect that it was running on Unity and create proxy GTK menus; the Mac OS X JRE does exactly this and it works for NetBeans at least.

[Jesse Glick (jesse-glick)]

I filed bug #984916 for Swing integration.