Comment 2 for bug 1574879

Thank you for taking your time to report this bug and making Ubuntu better.

Please try to install gvfs-libs and see if that fix it, then report it back here. Do not close the bug if it does as it indicates that the openjdk-8-jre package is missing a dependency and we would need to fix that.

What follows is a more technical overview of the underlying issue.

Desktop.browse(URI) calls sun.awt.DesktopBrowse.browse(URL) which is implemented by sun.awt.X11.XDesktopPeer.desktop(URL). That in turn call the native jni method gnome_url_show(byte[] url) that is dynamically linked by jdk/src/solaris/native/sun/xawt/gnome_interface.c to the gvfs function of the same name. Thus gvfs libraries must be installed on the system for those calls to work. Still it is not clear if and how exactly this will work out on a non-gnome system: a quick search didn't indicate exactly how gnome_url_show is set up (gconf?).