Yesterday I installed Jaspersoft Studio for the first time in my laptop. I’m using Ubuntu 17.10 as the operating system for my laptop.

I don’t usually work on Jasper Reports. But there was an error in a report on a project that I’m working on that needed to be fixed ASAP.

It was just a little error actually. So I decided to fix it myself. I installed Jaspersoft Studio 6.2.2 in my laptop. Since I’m using Ubuntu, I downloaded the .deb one.

Then I opened up the app. Strangely when I opened my jrxml file, the report design didn’t show up. There was an error message displayed but then it quickly disappeared before I could even read it (but I could quickly take a screenshot of the error message, haha). Moreover, the app itself was running very slowly.

Error opening the jrxml file on Ubuntu 17.10

So then I tried to download and install the .tgz one, hoping this time it could work. Still there was no luck. It still had the same problem.

I then googled the issue and, thanks God, finally I came accross this article in jaspersoft community forum. Apparently the problem is the app by default is not compatible with the version of GTK+3 used by Ubuntu. Fortunately the solution is easy. We just need to insert the magic words i.e. export SWT_GTK3=0 into the script runubuntu.sh.

#!/bin/bash
export SWT_GTK3=0
DIR=$(dirname "$0")
export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0;
"$DIR"/Jaspersoft\ Studio $*

Then execute again the script runubuntu.sh. Tadaaa….! Finally it works.

Yayyy… now the report design can show up