Hello,
Have you tried different Linux distros? I know JVM should work under any Linux distro but sometime things don't work under particular distro.
I know one large hospital they run Red hat workstation and with IBM JVM and they had some printing problem too. Since it was large installation (more than 500+ RH workstation) RedHat provided them some sort of patches.
Try switching distro; Few years back Blackdown JVM was quite hot
http://www.blackdown.org/