I wouldn’t guess it would be that hard to install Eclipse 3.4.2 Ganymede in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. After searching a
bit around the web, I concluded that it was not the way to go with sudo apt-get install eclipse this time.
Then I downloaded 3.4.2 from the Eclipse site,
extracted it, and started playing with it. The first command trial was
./eclipse. After issuing this command, Eclipse failed with an empty dialog after showing the splash screen in a few
seconds. Googling around the net revealed that I should run it with the -vm argument or by putting it into eclipse.ini
to avoid typing it later on:
./eclipse -vm /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_17/bin/java
After showing the splash screen, Eclipse failed again, but this time an error dialog showed where to find the cause of
the error: /home/ksevindik/workspace/.metadata/.log.
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467259
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1638)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:312)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.<init>(Browser.java:118)
Uh! Again, I needed to refer to Google for it. This time, I found a page suggesting to first install xulrunner with:
sudo apt-get install xulrunner
Then, I needed to add the following line into eclipse.ini:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner/xulrunner
Bingo! Eclipse starts now without any error, at least for the moment…