So he's using some type of virtual system to put linux on? Sorry, I'm not familiar with EC2. I wonder if the LWJGL demos even work on that. Worst-case scenario, if it's just on EC2, tell people not to use EC2 lol.
I think that I already saw this answered, but it happens using both Open Java and Sun Java, correct?
That's odd that the toolkit solution didn't work, so that might actually not be the bug. You should be able to try the "awt" solution as well without building LWJGL:
class ... {
static {
System.loadLibrary("awt");
System.setProperty("org.lwjgl.librarypath","...");
...
}
}