Installing eclipse in Ubuntu 10.04

Download Eclipse

Open a web browser and go to http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. There are several different bundles of Eclipse geared toward the different types of software development. You could take a basic Eclipse installation and manually build it into any one of these bundles. They are provided pre-bundled as a convenience for the developer. When in doubt, download the "Eclipse Classic" bundle. It is the mosttraditional bundle of Eclipse on the list. Select the Linux 32bit package, or 64bit if you're on an x86_64 system.

Preparing your system

We will set up a few folders for Eclipse in your home directory and unpack the Eclipse package into those folders.

Make an opt folder in your home directory:

$ mkdir ~/opt

Change directory to the folder where your browser downloaded the Eclipse package to. Then unpack Eclipse into the opt folder:

$ cd {directory where your browser downloaded the package to}
$ tar -zxvf eclipse-SDK-3.4.1-linux-gtk.tar.gz && mv eclipse ~/opt

Make a bin folder in your home directory, this will be used for the startup script:

$ mkdir ~/bin

Next create an executable for Eclipe at ~/bin/eclipse with your favorite text editor by typingvi ~/bin/eclipse or nano ~/bin/eclipse into the command line. Add the following content:

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/mozilla/"
export ECLIPSE_HOME="$HOME/opt/eclipse"

$ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*

Finally, allow the script to be executed:

$ chmod +x ~/bin/eclipse
$ PATH=~/bin:$PATH

HINT: If you are a gtk user and experience problems with the mouse buttons you should try add an export:

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

to the starter file.

You can now execute that file to start up Eclipse.