The fix for Gephi not starting on Arch Linux

Gephi is the leading visualization and exploration software for all kinds of graphs and networks. Gephi is open-source and free.

While trying to run Gephi on my computer, I have faced an issue where the application doesn’t start. It will just show the startup logo screen and then quits.

It turns out that the application is trying to find the local Java interpreter location to use and fails without any success. Gephi doesn’t use the default interpreter location and ignores the $JAVA_HOME variable.

To fix this issue, we to need to modify its config file and make it use a specific version of Java.

The solution to fix the issue is the following :

Make sure that you have Java OpenJDK version 8 installed. To check, in your terminal use this command :

➜  ~ archlinux-java status 
Available Java environments:
  java-11-openjdk
  java-15-openjdk (default)
  java-8-openjdk
➜  ~

Edit the Gephi config file at :

 /usr/share/java/gephi/etc/gephi.conf

Modify the “jdkhome” variable :

# default location of JDK/JRE, can be overridden by using --jdkhome <dir> switch
jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk"

And that’s it !

I hope that someone might find this useful.