BIRT Preview Crashes in Eclipse Designer on Linux

Question

Using Eclipse Indigo and Birt downloaded from the default update site on Ubuntu 11.10 and Oracle Java 7.

Whenever I try to preview a report, even an empty one with just static text in it, eclipse crashes with the following being written to stdout.

** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
No bp log location saved, using default.
[000:000] Browser XEmbed support present: 1
[000:001] Browser toolkit is Gtk2.
[000:001] Using Gtk2 toolkit
[000:001] Warning(optionsfile.cc:23): Load: Could not open file, err=2
[000:001] No bp log location saved, using default.
[000:001] Browser XEmbed support present: 1
[000:001] Browser toolkit is Gtk2.
[000:001] Using Gtk2 toolkit
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize
** (Eclipse:23704): DEBUG: NP_Initialize succeeded
Segmentation fault

If I start it with the the following command

./eclipse -vmargs -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

then eclipse no longer crashes, but the result is displayed in an external firefox browser.

My questions are

• is it possible to get eclipse / ubuntu / birt to work together happily without passing the additional parameters?
• if I do pass the additional parameters, is the behaviour I'm seeing correct?

Thanks in advance

Dave

Answer 1

This is a regression bug in eclipse 3.7: bug-349837 which is fixed in 3.7.1.

To answer your questions:

Is it possible to get eclipse / ubuntu / birt to work together happily without passing the additional parameters?

Unfortunately, at the moment not. -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla is the only way to avoid the error in general (see Comment 19).

if I do pass the additional parameters, is the behaviour I'm seeing correct?

No, I'm able to preview the reports within the internal web browser. Check if your able to use the internal web browser in general (see Preferences -> General -> Webbrowser). Since the xulrunner package is not included in the 11.10 release of ubuntu you have to install and configure it for eclipse manually:

1. Downlaod xulrunner package
   • 32bit
   • 64bit

2. Install it using dpkg

   sudo dpkg -i xulrunner-1.9.2[...].deb

3. Add vmargs parameter for the xulrunnerpath to eclipse.ini

   -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.2.17