SciNotes does not open any file after Ubuntu update

[Miguel Rubio-Roy]

After an upgrade of Ubuntu 14.04 the 26th of August 2014, on which among others openjdk-7 was updated, I cannot open any file on SciNotes and configuration file gets corrupted often. This a strongly blocking problem that prevents me from continuing using SciLab at all.

When I double click a file from SciLab file browser, SciNotes window opens without toolbar. If I click on any other window and then on SciNotes I get the toolbar but the file never opens. If I select File->Open, nothing happens.

I've tried purging all scilab packages and plugins and my ~/.Scilab preferences folder and reinstalling again. It didn't help.

I'm using Scilab 5.5.0-2 from Ubuntu's repositories and, after the 26th of august, openjdk-7-jre 7u65-2.5.1-4ubuntu1~0.14.04.2. I don't know what was the previous version.

I send attached my /var/log/dpkg.log regarding the 26/08/2014 and the console output of scilab when opening it, double clicking on a file, getting scinotes out of focus, and giving it focus again.

[Miguel Rubio-Roy (mrubioroy)]

The problem is specific to Ubuntu.

I installed the 5.5 binary from scilab in /opt and it works well.

[Miguel Rubio-Roy (mrubioroy)]

Ubuntu's version of Scilab runs well if Oracle's Java 7 JDK is used.

So, the WORKAROUND for this issue is:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java7-installer

Then two easy options (there are others):

1) You keep openjdk
you'll have to launch scilab in a terminal like this:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/
scilab

2) You uninstall openjdk
sudo dpkg --purge openjdk-7-jre default-jre openjdk-7-jre-headless default-jre-headless icedtea-7-jre-jamvm
then start scilab either in a terminal, using the icon or any other way