Netbeans 5.5 Blank Screen under Fedora Core 6
After a few months of not doing any Java code at all, I left my netbeans installation to atrophy while I did most of my work in good ole vi. After upgrading to Fedora Core 6, I tried to run my netbeans again to try out the Findbugs Netbeans plug-in. Unfortunately, I cannot get netbeans to start at all. Oh no!
After Googling and Googling, I found this bug report. It nicely describes the problem. Here is the summary below.
The problem is that AWT filters out all ConfigureNotify if the toplevel is not reparented. But Compiz doesn’t reparent windows at all. Possible solution would be detect if we are under Compiz and do not filter events
This problem makes sense because Fedora Core 6 comes with the Compiz window manager by default. Looks like they have a fix but it will not be out until Netbean 6. Poor compiz users like me. An obvious workaround would be to switch off compiz totally. But, that is NOT ACCEPTABLE. I want my eye candy! After some more searching, I found a solution that creates an embedded X session using a different window manager.
The first step would be to install Xephyr that is used to load an X session on top of another X session. Also a light weight window manager must also be loaded on top of that new X session.
yum install xorg-x11-server-Xephyr icewm
The next step would be to load this entire caboodle everytime you need to use netbeans.
#!/bin/bash
Xephyr :2 -ac -screen 1024x768 &
icewm --display :2 &
export DISPLAY=:2
/opt/netbeans/bin/netbeans &
So for all the Java folk using Netbeans and Fedora Core 6, hope this helps!
PS. I also learned that updating netbeans is not an easy thing to do. Newer versions of netbeans are not aware of old configuration settings and plugins. Grr… I upgraded to 5.5 from 5.5beta because I thought that was the cause of the blank screen problem.
March 28th, 2007 at 6:36 am
a similar issue happens to JDeveloper in these cases. JDeveloper produces a popup which you’re supposed to click on. However, the JDeveloper splash screen obscures this popup (and you can’t move it around as it has no decorations). I’m not sure if this is FC6 specific or something else entirely.
March 28th, 2007 at 8:52 am
does that system use compiz? the solution above can potentially work on that too. are you able to test it? just tell me how it goes.
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:44 am
Thanks, this helped a lot! I hate bugs like these…
June 2nd, 2007 at 1:14 pm
It worked. It solved the problem in Ubuntu 7.02 as well, thank you!
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:30 pm
It should work with a lot of other Java applications that run on systems that have compiz. Oh well.