Java Development Tools

Hi all wondering if anybody can advise me:

I'm currently running JDeveloper 10.1.2.1.0 (Build 1913) on Mepis Linux 2.4.3

To start with I was getting the "Debugger cannot connect to local process" error message using the free Java SDK that was installed with the system, so I downloaded and installed j2se 1.4.2_11 from Sun's website and set my library paths to the new SDK.

Now the debugger will run but it is painfully slow.

I have searched other threads on this topic and have since closed the "Smart Data" window and disabled my firewall, and the time it takes to step into has decreased but only slightly. It still takes about 5-10 seconds to do a step. Especially when the debugger hits a breakpoint and I have to switch between the GUI (I'm making a peer-to-peer battleships game based on raw tcp sockets) and the code window and back again, in which case it's more like 10-20 seconds til the debugger gets to the point where I can continue stepping (the red Execution point arrow appears).

Tis strange as it was working fine on SuSE Linux 10.0 using the same JDK and same version of JDeveloper and it works perfectly fine in Windows XP, just since I switched distros to Mepis it has been slow.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Martin