Charlie Harvey

Tip: Jitsi main screen blank on xmonad

Written by Charlie on

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I was just having a very headscratchy problem running Jitsi on debian on top of my xmonad windowmanager. I am adding this super quick tip in case anyone else encounters the same issue.

The problem

When running jitsi, the main interface screen is completely blank. A big grey nothing. After a significant amount of googling on duckduckgo, I eventually found the answer in section 4.12 of the xmonad FAQ

The solution

This is because Java has a list of non-reparenting windowmanagers hardcoded in it and xmonad is not on the list. The solution to the problem is simply to set the JAVAAWT_WM_NONREPARENTING environment variable when you run Jitsi.

Here is how to run Jitsi on xmonad if you want to be able to see the GUI properly.

$ _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 jitsi

jitsi on xmonad screenshot


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