NullPointerException with openjdk 6 on Ubuntu 12.04

Question

I recently upgraded to ubuntu 12.04 from 10.10. Since then, I get a NullPointerException in the TimeZone class with openjdk 6.

TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT-0:00");

There is no exception with openjdk 7, nor do my coworkers get an exception with openjdk6. So it looks like I'm missing some necessary library.

Also, this works just fine: TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT") on my machine with openjdk 6

Answer 1

I was able to solve it by complete removing the tzdata-java package and re-installing. Note that also removed a bunch of openjdk6 packages as well. (I had already tried completely removing and reinstalling the openjdk6 packages without luck).

Answer 2

I had a similar issue with DbVisualizer yesterday (NPE on startup), and it turned out that a forum post at http://www.dbvis.com/forum/thread.jspa?messageID=14474 had the solution.

Try running this command to see where your Java timezone files are located:

locate GMT | grep java | grep zi

In my case, the contents of /usr/share/javazi were symlinks that pointed to the actual files, and many of those symlinks were broken. I simply re-pointed the symlinks for my timezone to the new file locations, and that got DbViz working for me. Perhaps something similar will work for you.