Those days I found another brilliant example of non working java stuff. In fact it was an ubuntu laptop running the most recent jre from sun stating:

The program 'java' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'RenderBadPicture (invalid Picture parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 251 error_code 143 request_code 139 minor_code 6)
  (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.)

For my part I could narrow things down to swing, the UI stuff which can be worked around using a few parameters:

java -jar -Dswing.systemlaf=javax.swing.plaf.nimbus.NimbusLookAndFeel minecraft.jar