If you’ve tried out the just-released version of Eclipse Helios and within minutes of startup it dies with a RenderBadPicture error there’s an easy solution. Here’s the error message:

The program ‘Eclipse’ received an X Window System error.This probably reflects a bug in the program.The error was ‘RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)’.  (Details: serial 22386 error_code 172 request_code 152 minor_code 7)  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.   To debug your program, run it with the –sync command line   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

You’ll only see that in your console if you run eclipse from the terminal. Otherwise you get a pop-up dialog with too much information to humanly process.

The error is triggered when you do something that tries to auto-complete (or intelisense or whatever they call it) code for you. The eclipse bug spells out the solution. Basically you need to install xulrunner-1.9.2 and then start eclipse with a special command line option so that it knows where to find it.

The command to use is: (make sure this is all one line)

eclipse -vmargs -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/bin/xulrunner

The humorous part of this story is that the eclipse team marked this bug as not a problem with eclipse. Uhm, yeah, like people should just know this stuff.