XAWT uses Swing for its editable text components.
These need to emulate behaviour of Motif components which would
suggest that the MotifUI needs to be used - and for the most part it is.
However Swing does not support displaying components from multiple L&Fs
concurrently and since the default installed L&F for Swing is "Metal"
it is possible for the swing text components to pick up some properties
that are associated with the installed L&F.
The particular example is that in mustang Metal uses the desktop font smoothing
setting which on Gnome desktops is typically greyscale antialiased text.
This gets inherited by the XAWT TextArea. By contrast (inconsistently)
the non-editable text such as a "java.awt.Label" doesn't get so affected
as this just uses Graphics.drawString(..) directly rather than
going via Swing components.

Run the small program below on mustang on the Solaris 10 gnome desktop
and use "xmag" to see that the text is antialiased in the text area.
Run it again with an arg to see that it is not antialiased when
the Motif L&F is installed.


import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;

public class XAWTUI {

        public static void main(String[] args) {

        String motif = "com.sun.java.swing.plaf.motif.MotifLookAndFeel";

        try {
            if (args.length > 0) UIManager.setLookAndFeel(motif);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println(e);
        }

        Frame f = new Frame("TextLengthTest");
        Panel p = new Panel();
        TextArea ta = new TextArea(15, 30);
        ta.setText("Hello");
        p.add("Center", ta);
        p.add("South", new Label("Hello World"));
        f.add(p);
        f.setSize(400, 400);
        f.setVisible(true);
    }
}

The Swing view is that since using the MotifUI when the installed L&F
is Metal is not supported this is not a bug in Swing.
I'm not sure if its at all worth fixing since although its inconsistent
it doesn't appear to be bad! Remote display won't be a perfomance problem
either since Swing turns off AA for remote display for just that reason.

In fact the more noticeable problems are related to repainting for the
blinking text caret
 - it clears an area including part of the border/scroll bars which
   contributes to excessive flicker
 - the caret is a vertical bar '|' whereas the native motif one is more
   like an 'I' (as displayed in the Courier New font with horizontal bars
   at top and bottom).

1) The are tha
1) Excessive flicker
2) The care