Comment 0 for bug 258374

The recent Java update (~ Aug 14, 2008) breaks some Java applications in window managers such as Awesome (and others).

From the Awesome FAQ:
"Java applications which use the XToolkit/XAWT backend may draw grey windows only. The XToolkit/XAWT backend breaks ICCCM-compliance in recent JDK 1.5 and early JDK 1.6 versions, because it assumes a reparenting window manager. As a workaround you can use JDK 1.4 (which doesn´t contain the XToolkit/XAWT backend) or you can set the following environment variable (to use the older Motif backend instead): AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit"

Not sure how you would handle this but my application was working fine before the update and then broke unceremoniously afterward -- switching to another WM worked fine as did adding the AWT_TOOLKIT parameter. It just took a little research to find a fix.

I was switching back and forth between the sun-java package and the openjdk -- I was able to get the parameter method to work using the sun version.

Package: sun-java6-jre
Source: sun-java6
Version: 6-06-0ubuntu1