I have finally solved my problem. It was an issue of jogl-2.3.2 not supporting correctly the mesa version I have installed (17.2.7), basically jogl-2.3.2 is not correctly recognizing the mesa driver for opengl support. You can read more details here:

https://github.com/hharrison/java3d-core/issues/23
http://forum.jogamp.org/problem-using-j ... 38557.html

where there is a patch needed to fix the issue. Anyway the problem will be definitely fixed with the future jogl-2.3.3 version.

On my system then, I am able to run SH3D both with j3d-core 1.5.2 and 1.6