This article describes a solution to fix a long term issue (bug?) involving copy & paste when running Eclipse on KDE.

The problem

When launching Eclipse from KDE, one might experience several types failures with cut, copy and paste actions in Eclipse. The reported misbehavior is non-deterministic, but frequent enough to degrade user experience.

Inside the editor, specially the Java or C/C++ editor, selecting text and issuing the copy action (ctrl+c or equivalent menu entry) may not copy the select text to the clipboard (no text is copied).

These days we were implementing a distributed application where processes read startup information from a shared file stored in an NFS directory. Unfortunately, the approach did not work as expected, and we faced strange situations. After all, we learned that polling NFS shared directories can be quite tricky.

The original approach

Let me explain shortly the algorithm that was initially intended for the application. There is one master process and other N slave processes running on different machines. All of them are started nearly at the same time. But the slave processes must first wait for a file with instructions created and written by the master process.

Many IBM applications are based on eclipse for i386 architectures. Just some examples: Lotus Notes, Sametime, Symphony, IES (IBM eclipse SDK). However, the Fedora 9 for x86_64 architectures does not install any 32 bits libraries anymore. How shall these applications now run on Fedora 9?

One one side, these applications were designed for Linux on 32 bit architectures. Therefore, they were build on the 32 bits eclipse framework that relies on several JNI (Java Native Interface) calls to 32 bit libraries. The most important library is the low level access to gtk API.

I have been using xfs for some months now. Somewhere I had read about advantages of xfs and got convinced that I should store my files on that file system (sorry, I don’t remember the references anymore).

Today it happened that, suddenly, eclipse complained that all the files I was editing did not exist anymore on the workspace and that the file view was out of sync with the file system. Probably, a bug of new Ganymede version, I thought. But in sequence, everything crashed: KDE, firefox, Sametime, Notes, …

For a long time I have been struggling on Linux to easily create backup copies of my favorite movies, until I finally found k9copy.

Before k9copy, backing up dvds was darkness

On one hand, there are many fancy video tools available for Windows. However, nearly all of them have some kind of embedded spyware or virus. On the other hand, Linux tools are all written for command line, and require a lot of expertise just to understand what they do.

I like Java very much. Nevertheless, there are things I cannot stand in Java. Sure, and one of them are undocumented exceptions from the Java API, that nobody can explain.

I will talk about “Write end dead” IOExceptions. What does this mean? Why did this happen? Even if googling around, it is difficult to find a clear answer.

This article is a full explanation to understand this exception and shows how to fix your code. Just continue reading…