How to get Eclipse 3.4 / JavaEE to run on 11.2

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1

For those interested, I’ll share my solution on getting Eclipse running smoothly with 11.2.

My very first problem was that I needed the JavaEE version, which is not in the distro. The second problem is that the distro version has issues:

Problems with the distro version:

  • The infamous “button doesn’t work” problem (more on this later)
  • The plugin / updates don’t work, so you can’t add any modules
  • Copying and pasting is very erratic

However, if you simply download and unpack 3.4.2 from the Eclipse site, you’ll get a “Problem has occurred” error when you try to launch it.

Here are the steps to get this running:

  • Unpack the .tar.gz package into a folder that is writable by your userid

  • To fix the “An Error has occured” problem: Add the following line at the very end of the eclipse.ini file:


-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib64/xulrunner-1.9.1/xulrunner

If you run on 32-bit, replace ‘lib64’ with ‘lib’.

  • To fix the “button doesn’t work” problem: in your ~/bin directory, create a file called eclipse.sh and put the following in there:

#!/bin/sh

# work around e#290395 / LP: #458703
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

# replace /home/noarch/apps/eclipse with the path
# to where you've unpacked Eclipse
/home/noarch/apps/eclipse/eclipse "$@"

Then with Menu Editor, add a new Item underneath Development. Point the command to the full path to eclipse.sh created above. Click on the icon and navigate to …/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.platform_3.3.101.v200902111700 and pick one of the icons from there.

  • To fix the copying/pasting problems (VERY annoying) - I would assume this is only a problem on KDE - close Klipper, it interferes with the way Eclipse manages its clipboard. In my case, I NEVER use Klipper, so that was an easy decision.

Have fun.

2

Thank you for the hints here.

After applying these I got an error letting me know it could not write to eclipse.ini -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 214 2010-01-25 10:46 /usr/share/eclipse/eclipse.ini

so I applied the universal beating stick of chmod a+w and now suffer from
Error saving manipulator.
java.lang.NullPointerException

Any other clues on getting past this new, happy stumbling block?

3

Well, as I mention in the original text, you should unpack Eclipse in a folder writable to your user id. It’s best to do that as yourself (i.e. not root).

4

I was using the package that ships with openSUSE - why would they need to have root to run it?

5

I guess the point of my post was how to install Eclipse if you can’t use the distro version, since it doesn’t have the Java EE plugins installed. In that case, you need to download the tar.gz from the Eclipse site and then use my instructions to get it working.

If you install Eclipse from the distro, it’ll (should) run just fine by itself, but you can’t create any Java EE apps.

So, if you don’t need Java EE, my recommendation is to use the distro version. Check in your KDE/GNOME menu for an entry to launch Eclipse, and you should be fine.

6

Thanks! This has been on my to do list.