Use Oracle's JRE. Jabref seems to have problems with OpenJDK and IcedTea, as suggested here and here. Maybe only on 64-bit systems, but I don't know.
Several manuals show how to replace OpenJDK with Oracle Java, for example this. Follow them for instructions, if you generally want to use Oracle Java instead of OpenJDK.
If, instead, you want to leave your system as is, but use Oracle Java only for running JabRef, follow these steps:
- Download a JRE distribution. Choose the tgz package for your system (32 or 64 bit).
- Extract the JRE distribution into a dedicated folder, e.g.
/home/user/bin/myjre
. - Download a JAR distribution of JabRef.
- Save JabRef.jar to a dedicated location, e.g.
/home/user/bin/JabRef-2.9.2.jar
. Execute JabRef by calling:
/home/user/bin/myjre/bin/java -jar /home/user/bin/JabRef-2.9.2.jar
This leaves your system's OpenJDK intact and all other programs will continue to use that. Instead of steps 3 and 4 you could probably also locate the JabRef.jar that your package manager will install. This will usually be a slightly older version, however.