Hi again,
I finally got to the point of trying to manually install Oracle's JDK
and that made absolutely no difference. I had to dig into the source
code of both DocAnalyzer and UIManager to understand that the
getSystemLookAndFeelClassName, called by the DocAnalyzer, is explicitly
checking for GNOME desktop being in use. On a non-GNOME desktop, even if
GTK is available, the method falls back on unusable Metal, not even
Nimbus. That is very restrictive, as GNOME3 is now unusable because of
the damned hot corner that always kicks me out of what I am doing and
cannot be disabled without relying on outdated distribution and version
specific Java-script-patching procedures on some forums, so I am using
XFCE.
Fortunately, I found a workaround: pass
-Dswing.systemlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.gtk.GTKLookAndFeel in the JVM
arguments. That overrides the bad guess of the JVM and fallback to
Metal. Note that the usual property name would be swing.defaultlaf, but
I had to use swing.systemlaf because of the DocAnalyzer activating the
system look and feel (this would have normally worked, though).
If I could find a way to have this passed all the times, without having
to change the launch configuration of each UIMA tool, I would be
happier, but this is already a very good step forward. At least I am not
blocked anymore by this, and can continue exploring under Linux.
Hope this can help others.
