Yesterday, I installed shiny new Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on a shiny new laptop. This morning, I launched a Web Start application, and I got the following screen:
Look at the weird font. And the double checkbox.
When I continued, my desktop locked up and I had to reboot. Good thing Lucid Lynx reboots amazingly quickly because I went through that for several more times before I finally figured out what was wrong.
No, this time it was not gcj/OpenJDK/Iced Tea or a missing Java Plug-In in
Firefox. I had sun-java6-jdk installed, and it properly set up
Firefox. What about the JNLP association?
Looking good...
I restarted Firefox from a terminal, hoping to see some console messages. Here is what I got:
That was weird. wininet? wine3d_guess_card? The
plot thickened.
It turns out that Wine installed a MIME type handler
~/.local/share/applications/wine-extension-jnlp.desktop. I still
don't know what made it do that. But removing that file solved the problem.
Alternatively, don't accept the default in Firefox but explicitly tell Firefox
to run /etc/alternatives/javaws.
I always felt that the JNLP association is a terribly fragile part of Java Web Start. (That's why I never check the "Do this automatically for files like this from now on" box in Firefox.) It might be a good idea for Oracle to put in a check in the Java Plug-In to check the integrity of the JNLP association when it loads.