This is very old and known problem. And looks like it can't be pushed in upstream, so some distributions including this patch by itself. The X Window System integration in most modern implementations of the Java virtual machine (JVM) displays only empty, gray windows when used with many non-re-parenting window managers, such as Awesome. This is almost certainly a violation of ICCCM and has been reported to Sun Microsystems a number of times. http://bugs.sun.com/view_bug.do?bug_id=6429775 The versions of OpenJDK that ship with some operating system distributions—at least Debian (and Ubuntu) and Arch Linux in March and August of 2009, respectively—have had this problem fixed by the vendors. Just set the environment variable _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING to any value to inform the JVM that your window manager does not re-parent. $ _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1; export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING Patch applied in Debian http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=508650 Patch applied in Arch https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/15674
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 339741 ***
