If you do a google search you will find this problem goes all the way back to version 18! I am sure it is in the arduino package but seems to be fixed in the git repository. I could not run arduino 1.0 under Mint but I could under Debian. (I had recently changed my OS.) But when I installed processing it ran fine. This told me that java wasn't the problem. There are lots of posts on this error about making sure java is installed correctly and making sure classpath is correct and reinstalling the AVR tool chain. These are all dead ends.
I didn't pour over the change log but building from git is easy and it gives one the latest version. In my opinion it would be a waste of time to try and fix an existing version that has this error. Just build it new and you are good to go. And once you do that it is very easy to keep up to date with the latest version.
But if one wants to reinvent the wheel go for it.