Black preview in GWT Designer in Eclipse on Ubuntu

Unfortunatly there’s a small snag when you’re using GWT designer on ubuntu with the libwebkit libs. When libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.2 isn’t found, the GWT designer will display a black field when you’re editing gui items, as shown on the example below:

GWT Designer on Ubuntu

You can easily solve this by symbolic linking to the already existing libwebkit library. Only execute the commands which are shown in bold:

joris@dipshit:~$ cd /usr/lib
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$ ls -lhatr |grep libwebkit
-rw-r--r--   1 root root       19M 2011-04-20 14:52 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        25 2011-08-12 19:14 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 -> libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 libwebkit-1.0.so.2
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$ ls -lhatr |grep libwebkit
-rw-r--r--   1 root root       19M 2011-04-20 14:52 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        25 2011-08-12 19:14 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 -> libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        21 2011-09-06 23:04 libwebkit-1.0.so.2 -> libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$

Remark; This’ll create the symbolic link based on the link which Ubuntu already placed. If we would place it on 0.6.0, there might be a problem when we upgrade libwebkitgtk.
Happy designing!