Here’s a weird problem I’ve been having lately that I thought I’d blog the solution to so that other people can have better luck when googling. Essentially, I installed a brand new copy of Ubuntu on my work laptop and was having an odd issue with the buttons in dialog boxes not working when I clicked on them.
Luckily, after some searching, I found this solution in the FAQ:
$ export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true $ ./eclipse
That seems to have fixed the problem for me… but according to the FAQ “Your Mileage May Vary”. Good luck!


Yea, that problem has been around for a while now and seems to affect many version of Eclipse and it’s derivatives (Aptana Studio, Zend, etc).
To avoid having to manually set the environmental variable each time you need to use a program affected by the bug, a simple solution is to create a bash script, and run that instead, e.g.
touch AptanaFixed
chmod +x AptanaFixed
Then edit the file and add:
#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/home/(your username)/Aptana\ Studio\ 2.0/AptanaStudio
Create a launcher or link and you are good to go.