Linux, BlueJeans and SpringSource Tool Suite

Not everything is gold that shines

This has been a long, long day. I learned once again that people don't care about users using their programs but they care very much about those few that give them money. This is also the case with BlueJeans...

The problem

I was a bad smell from the beginning. To use BlueJeans you need to install the nprbjn plugin which is provided as a deb/rpm package. On Linux Mint (which I'm happily using for many months now) I choose the deb package, installed it and voila! Everything was up and running. It was such a relief from using this piece of shit WebEx that it felt almost surreal. I soon realized that my joy was premature. After I restarted STS (while on the meeting..) I was kind of shocked that just a few seconds into using it it just shut down on its own. No warning, no message, no nothing - just bang! and it was gone.

I tried doing pretty much everything: installing and reinstalling Eclipse, reinstalling STS - nothing helped. And so I arrived at removing the BJ plugin after which everything immediately went back to normal. And I said to myself "what a piece of crap!" but hey - you need to work with it and besides the fact that it is screwing with the main application you're using on a daily basis (pretty much 80% of the time) everything else looks and works kind of nice.

I even went through the trouble and created a support ticket explaining the whole situation but there was no concrete solution beyond we'll look into it and 3 months later there's still no fix for that annoying bug.

The solution

Or should I rather say workaround... How can we make it work both ways?

1. Start firefox with -p parameter - this will open a new window for selecting profiles
2. Create a new profile, let's call it Eclipse
3. Check the 'Use the selected profile without asking at startup' and click Start Firefox - the new profile will be initialized
5. Start STS, navigate to Window -> Preferences and select General -> Web Browser
6. Highlight 'Firefox' in the list of browsers, click 'Edit' and in the 'parameters' field type

-p Eclipse

7. Click OK, then Apply and close STS
8. Close Firefox, start it again with -p but this time select the 'default' profile so that everything is back to normal with your browser

This will ensure that Eclipse has its own clean profile and you can use STS without interruption.

Happy coding!