Ubuntu 9.10 and sticky java dialog boxes.

I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 in my laptop and have been suffering from an unusual problem. The buttons on dialog boxes created by the eclipse ide 'stick'. When I click on any button in a dialog, it gets stuck in the down position and never activates. The only solution is to tab over to the button if possible and activate it with the return key. Very irritating.

I finally tracked down the fix today. The problem is caused by something related to the way in which GDK renders its windows in the latest version. The solution is to set the environment variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 prior to launching eclipse. Apparently this is also a problem on newer versions of Fedora as well. Indeed it is probably an issue with anything running gdk 2.18 or newer, where the switch to 'client side windows' was made.

I've fixed this by renaming eclipse to eclipse.bin and placing the following script named eclipse in the same directory:

#!/bin/bash
BASE=$(dirname $0)
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
exec $BASE/eclipse.bin

don't forget to chmod +x it so that it is executable. You'll also have to rename eclipse.ini to eclipse.bin.ini -- eclipse finds its ini based on the binary name.

sheesh.

For an explanation of what GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS is all about, check out the post "What GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1" means over on Dax's blog.