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All of my development work lately has been using Oracle databases. My development tool of choice for interacting with the databases is Oracle SQL Developer. It is the sole reason I have Java installed on my laptop.

I was disconcerted to find out that after my upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) that I wasn’t able to use SQL Developer successfully. Issues Included:

• Windows not appearing correctly;
• I was unable to type into text fields;
• Oddly I could paste into text fields, but couldn’t type into them; or
• Buttons appear to be inactive, you could click on them but nothing would happen.

It turns out that there is a known issue with the Java and the Compiz / Beryl window systems. The bug is outlined in this bug report on the Sun Developer Network website. Unfortunately the bug is marked as closed, and yet there are multitple calls to re-open it again and there are numerous posts around about this issue already.

Compiz is the system that the Ubuntu 7.10 uses to provide the nice eye candy for windows and the user interface in general. Although some of it, like the wobbly windows, can be a bit much after a while. These screenshots give you some idea of what Compiz can do, including the one feature that everyone seems to know about, having multiple desktops on a rotating cube.

The way I fixed my problem is to add this line to the sqldeveloper.sh as the second line in the file.

export AWT_TOOLKIT="MToolKit"

or

export AWT_TOOLKIT="MToolkit"

See the comment from devnull below.

There are reports that this can fix other Java based applications, and there are also reports that this doesn’t work at all so YMMV.

It is also possible to export this variable as a global environment variable. However I’ll not detail that here as I’ve not tried it, I have only one Java application on my system.

Perhaps it will work for you as well.