This appears likely to be an issue with certain graphics cards. I have an Optimus setup (an Intel card that is used most of the time, alongside an NVidia card that can be activated for graphically-intensive things), and forcing the game to run with the dedicated graphics card resolved the issue.
I have this too, in Ubuntu 12.10 with the Cinnamon desktop environment, 64-bit, Java version 1.7.0_25. You can see the output to the terminal at: http://pastebin.com/agwEvZn9
IMPORTANT ADDENDUM:
This appears likely to be an issue with certain graphics cards. I have an Optimus setup (an Intel card that is used most of the time, alongside an NVidia card that can be activated for graphically-intensive things), and forcing the game to run with the dedicated graphics card resolved the issue.