Personal Profile compile

Question

Hi all,
I recently downloaded the cdc personal profile. I've managed to compile the profile on Red Hat 9 ( compiled cleanly...only some minor warnings ). When I try to run the HelloWorld example packaged within the democlasses.zip file ( should display a window with Hello World in big red letters ), I get the following exception:
java.lang.NullPointerException:
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Ljava/lang/String;ZLjava/lang/ClassLoader;)Ljava/lang/Class;(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Ljava/lang/String;)Ljava/lang/Class;(Class.java:127)
at java.awt.GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment()Ljava/awt/GraphicsEnvironment;(GraphicsEnvironment.java:72)
So, I traced throught the code. After doing a little debugging, I discovered that the GraphicEnvironment retrieves null for the java.awt.graphicsenv environment variable. Noticing that a doPrivileged call is made, my first thought was that it was a security thing. So I added the java.awt.graphicsenv entry within my java.policy file. Reran the example and still the same exception. I'm baffled as to why a call to retrieve this environment variable is always returning null. I can add a call to System.getProperties() within the GraphicsEnvironment class and it shows that that entry is set to sun.awt.gtk.GdkGraphicsEnvironment. Has anyone encountered this problem? What I'm noticing is that when I call System.getProperty( String name ) it seems to always return null?? I tried:
System.getProperty( "java.awt.graphicsenv" );
System.getProperty( "awt.toolkit" );
System.getProperty( "java.awt.AlphaComposite.SRC_OVER.isRestricted" );
All returned null! Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I know there is a rpm version of the personal profile - I've tried it and it works great - but I really need to be able to compile it for myself as I'm going to have to provide some porting libraries and classes.
Thanks in advance!
Best Regards,
Jeff

Answer 1

I figured it out!!
It had to do with the makefiles that were responsible for generating those environment variables. More specifically, personal/build/share/defs_basis.mk and personal/build/share/rules.mk. The defs.mk defined a SYSTEM_PROPERTIES variable. It goes through a bunch of if statements to determine which environment variables will be set. Statement looks like this:
SYSTEM_PROPERTIES += "name=value\n"
Well, its the rules.mk file that parses that SYSTEM_PROPERTIES variable to generate a system_properties.c file. The line that does this is:
$(AT) echo $(SYSTEM_PROPERTIES) | sed -e 's/ *\(.*\)=\(.*\)/     PUTPROP (props, "\1", "\2");/' >> .system_properties.c
This line echos SYSTEM_PROPERTIES and pipes that output to sed which will then parse out each "name=value". Then it will print out PUTPROP( props, "name", "value" );
The problem that I was encountering was when this line parsed the SYSTEM_PROPERTIES it was parsed as follows:
name1=value1n name2=value2n .... the \n characters were not being recognized! Therefore all of the name=value pairs were being output on one line. Sed is expecting these things to be on their own line. Therefore the environment variables were not being set correctly by the System. So I made a minor modification to the echo command to interpret the "/n":
$(AT) echo -e $(SYSTEM_PROPERTIES) | sed -e 's/ *\(.*\)=\(.*\)/     PUTPROP (props, "\1", "\2");/' >> .system_properties.c
The -e tells echo to interpret any escape characters within the String. Made the fix, recompiled, and everything works great!!
Regards,
Jeff