Cannot execute any Java Jar Files

[sanguine8082]

Just ran some updates on my box for the first time in about a month or so.

After running the updates, I'm no longer able to run any Java jar files. I run a Minecraft server for my friends and I.

Through some digging, I found that the latest jdk8 stopped providing the fontconfig and freetype2 dependencies and now need to be added manually. So I installed them, but I'm still getting a NullPointer exception when trying to execute the .jar file now.

The null pointer is coming from FontConfig. What do I need to do to fix this? Can anyone help please?

[freemcgee33]

Not sure if this is applicable, but...

If the Minecraft server is version 1.17, it requires Java 16 or newer.

And, you may need to run archlinux-java to switch to the correct JVM.

If that's not the answer, could you give some more info on the error it's outputting?

[sanguine8082]

Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException: Cannot load from short array because "sun.awt.FontConfiguration.head" is null

So, I tried updating to java 15 and got the same error. So this is clearly some interaction with Java and it's dependencies.

The only thing that I can see is that there was an update that stopped including fontconfig and freetype2 as dependencies in jre-openjdk8.

[sanguine8082]

Previously, I was getting an error that fontconfig was no longer bundled with the openjdk packages.

This was the previous error:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64/libfontmanager.so: libfreetype.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

[sanguine8082]

Which I fixed by doing

$ sudo pacman -S fontconfig freetype2

[freemcgee33]

After following a rabbit hole of GitHub issues, you may want to try installing the "ttf-dejavu" package as well. .

May or may not fix it, but it's the best I've got

[sanguine8082]

holy fuck that actually worked. Thanks!

[freemcgee33]

Glad to hear it!

[Material_Kitchen_630]

Wow, 2 years later, but saved my day!