How to find which libraries does Java Desktop API require on Linux?

Question

I am trying to find a way how to determine which libraries does Java require for Desktop API to work, specifically the BROWSE function. I read a few guides, bug reports and workarounds, but none of them work.

I was able to make it work on Debian by installing libgnome2-0 and gvfs-backends packages. The first one is typically recommended (by people solving the same problem), the second one was a lucky guess because it seems that the Desktop API required the vfs. However I can't make this work on Ubuntu 14.04, even with installing these two packages.

So my question is: How can I find which libraries does Java Desktop API require on Linux? Specifically Oracle JDK 8 on Ubuntu 14.04. Is it possible to somehow capture which libraries is the desktop API using or get some error output from the native code?

EDIT: I've created a one line code that is trying to use the browse:

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws URISyntaxException, IOException {
        Desktop.getDesktop().browse(new URI("http://www.google.com"));
    }
}

I've tried to run a command to trace all files that have been requested during the execution of the test:

strace -e open,access -f -o browse java -jar BrowseTester.jar

I get a lot of output indicating both java native and linux native libraries are being looked for, found and accessed, but I am not sure how to detect what is actually missing.

Example of the output:

30171 open("/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gvfs/tls/x86_64/libgvfscommon.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
30171 open("/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gvfs/tls/libgvfscommon.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
30171 open("/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gvfs/x86_64/libgvfscommon.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
30171 open("/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/gvfs/libgvfscommon.so", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 11

I need a way how to detect which native libraries are needed for the Java Desktop API browse functionality. I can't touch the code that is calling the browse.

EDIT2: I've tried to install a new Ubuntu 14.04 with complete Gnome environment on a different machine and it works. However I would really like to avoid this because it adds 1.5GB of (mostly) unused libraries. Still looking for a way how to find what Java requires exactly or at least some kind of output from the place where it fails.

Answer 1

Going to the source might help here. Digging through the Makefile, I find these includes:

EXTRA_INCLUDES = `pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0` \
                 `pkg-config --cflags libgnome-2.0` \
                 `pkg-config --cflags gnome-vfs-2.0`\
                 `pkg-config --cflags gnome-vfs-module-2.0` \
                 `pkg-config --cflags bonobo-activation-2.0` \
                 `pkg-config --cflags libbonobo-2.0` \
                 `pkg-config --cflags ORBit-2.0` \
                 `pkg-config --cflags gconf-2.0`

And there you have it :)