Fixing Eclipse for Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10

I use Ubuntu as operating system on my development machine. I keep my system up-to-date and apply patches and upgrades to new releases as soon as they are available for download. After upgrading to Karmic Koala 9.10 I noticed, that all my development tools based on Eclipse (STS, RadRails, Aptana Studio) are experiencing same problem: buttons on most dialog boxes (wizards, properties windows etc.) could not be pushed any more using mouse. Of course keyboard shortcuts still worked.

I searched in Google and found out that there is a bug in Eclipse Bugzilla filled in describing my problem:

Starting from 2.18 on, GTK+ changed some of its internal behaviour (google for “client side windows”). This change is intentional, and needed for other development. It doesn’t make any difference to programs using GTK+ correctly, but it makes problems with programs that use GTK+ in weird ways, making wrong assumptions that only accidentally worked in the past. So, to ease the transition until those programs get fixed, an environment variable has been introduced to simulate the old behaviour.

Given bug will be fixed in Eclipse 3.5.2

There is also a simple workoround available: you must create a executable script setting environment variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 before executing Eclipse.

Example for my STS distribution (you must change Eclipse folder name and executable name accordingly):

Code block

#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/opt/sts-2.2.1.RELEASE/STS