Month: November 2025

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Easily running SWT on different Linux Distros

As a follow-up to my earlier article on testing and developing SWT on GTK, I’ve recently run into a set of challenges that require running SWT tests, samples, and even the full IDE across multiple Linux distributions and different GTK minor versions.

Historically, whenever I needed to test Eclipse on another distro, I’d either dual-boot my machine-using a shared data partition to keep setup simple, or, for quick one-off experiments, spin up a VM. Occasionally I’d throw together a Docker image just for a single test run.

But as I found myself switching between environments more frequently, those ad-hoc approaches grew cumbersome. I needed something faster and more repeatable. So I formalized the Docker approach and built a workflow that lets me launch Java applications-including SWT under X11 or Wayland-with just a click or two.

The result is swt-dev-linux (https://github.com/jonahgraham/swt-dev-linux), a GitHub repository where I’m collecting and documenting the scripts that make this workflow straightforward and reliable. If you need to test SWT across different Linux/GTK configurations, I hope it makes your life easier too.

Demo

Here is a screenshot where I have the SWT ControlExample running on 4 different distros simultaneously. It makes it easy to compare and contrast behaviours:

In a process tree this looks like:

The above examples were all running on GTK4 + x11, the next example is running GTK4 one on x11 and one on wayland on Fedora 43, with my host distro being Ubuntu 25.10:

Recursive SDKs Demo

Here is another screenshot showing (from top left):

  • Eclipse SDK setup with my main SWT development environment, launching:
  • a child Eclipse SDK running on my Ubuntu docker container, launching:
  • a child Eclipse SDK also running on my Ubuntu docker container, launching:
  • a hello world Java application

Here is what the process tree looks like for the nested SDKs:

Intrigued?

Come visit my GitHub repo at https://github.com/jonahgraham/swt-dev-linux and try it out and let me know what you think. File an issue or a PR!