Something that really bugged me (and still does) about the ubuntu since I installed it is that eclipse is not even close to being the latest version in the package manager. That just seems really strange to me to have such and awesome and widely used IDE not supported in Ubuntu. Anyhow I am not writing this post to just complain about Ubuntu’s quirks, I am writing to detail the steps that I took to get it setup and working on my Ubuntu 8.04.1 64 bit box.
Using the Sun Java
I started off by doing your standard Google search and came up with this page listed promently on the Ubuntu community site:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EclipseIDE
I followed the instructions to get the Java 6 from Sun installed on the system. But I stopped after the install of Java 6 since my install is basically a download of eclipse it wasn’t going to have the /etc/eclipse/java_home that was described on the community page.
With a little more searching I came across this page which gave a brief description his installation. From his post I edited my ~/.bashrc file and added in the export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/ so that my default JAVA_HOME would be the sun java.
Getting Eclipse
To get the latest eclipse distribution I went to the eclipse download page and downloaded the eclipse classic, my preferred base distro. Once I had the file I extracted the eclipse directory. I’m not a linux guru and didn’t know the ‘best’ place to put the eclipse directory so i put it in /opt/.
Running Eclipse
Once I had the application in the directory I decided to add it to my applications menu. I did so by right clicking on the ‘Applications’ menu and selecting the ‘Edit Menus’ option. From there I went into the Applications > Programming menu on the left side and created a ‘New Item’. I chose the type of ‘Application’ and a name of ‘Eclipse’. For the command I entered ‘/opt/eclipse/eclipse -vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/java’ just to make sure that eclipse was being loaded with the correct jvm.
Using Eclipse
So far I have not had any problems with any of the plugins that I commonly use (CFEclipse, Subclipse, etc) that aren’t found on all system.
That’s what I did to get Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede running on Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron, so enjoy!