If you upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, some of the buttons in Eclipse don’t work. This is a well known conflict between GDK and X windows. There are a couple of fixes, one is to update the environment variables, but I like this one because it works well for eclipse. Read a solution after the jump.

First, locate your eclipse executable:

which eclipse

Mine was in

/usr/local/bin/eclipse, but this was a symlink to /usr/local/eclipse/eclipse

I moved that file to a slightly different name:

mv /usr/local/eclipse/eclipse /usr/local/eclipse/eclipse.bin

then, make an executable called eclipse to replace the file we moved:

vi /usr/local/eclipse/eclipse

 
#!/bin/bash
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/usr/local/eclipse/eclipse.bin
 
 

and make sure it is executable. Now everytime that you run eclipse your buttons will work just fine!!

Important: If you do this, be sure to rename your eclipse.ini file too. If you are seeing Permgen errors, then you need to increase the amount of memory allocated to the JVM (search google for the correct answer), but you make these changes in eclipse.ini. However, if you rename your eclipse executable to eclipse.bin then you need to rename your .ini file to eclipse.bin.ini