Comment 3 for bug 1138517

I can confirm this occurs in OpenJDK 6 & 7. As an alternative, you can install Xephyr and a minimal WM

$ sudo apt-get install metacity

The following workaround works for me:

$ Xephyr :1 -screen 1280x800

inside your Xephyr you will have an xterm shell.. type:

$ metacity :1 &

You will see a titlebar appear on the enclosed xterm window.

Now just run your java applicaiton like you normally would from the terminal.

( if it is a jar file)
$ java -jar myjavaapp.jar