I've been fighting with the mysterious "Swing GTK apps are blank" issue on java now for *months* and only finally found what was wrong: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/721215/how-can-i-fix-a-java-gui-program-swing-that-it-works-with-awesome-wm vvvvvvvvvv Java applications which use the XToolkit/XAWT backend may draw grey windows only. The XToolkit/XAWT backend breaks ICCCM-compliance in recent JDK 1.5 and early JDK 1.6 versions, because it assumes a reparenting window manager. ^^^^^^^ So it would be incredibly useful for awesomewm to do one of the following: - suggest via warnings to use wmname to set their WM name to LG3D, so that Swing apps work. - have an inbuilt feature that forces the WM name to LG3D ( possibly enabled via USE flag )
I've added an elog in =awesome-3.5-r1 that covers this. Thanks :)
This actually fixes far more than apps being blank. Just about every java app I tried (such as arduino) had menus that were completely useless without it. Is there anyway we can have this setup automatically instead of simply including a message? Seems to me that at the very least wmname should be a dependency and the default config file should include setting it.
Setting the window manager to LG3D actually didn’t fix the java issues for me. I am using IcedTea JDK 7.2.6.3 and awesome v3.5.6. As stated in the awesome wiki (http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Problems_with_Java#JMenuBar_shifted), using wmname Sawfish did the job for me. I think you should either change the notice to include this or just point to the wiki.