This holiday I wanted to use eclipse on my new install of Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”), but found it somewhat strange to do with the Add/Remove tool and searched a way to consistently install it and integrate on the Desktop environment.
The first thing I have done was to go on “Synaptic Package Manager” in “Administration” and search for the last JDK to install, you can do it by searching for jdk using the search button. In the time I’m writing, the latest JDK avaliable package avaliable was sun-java6-jdk. It needed some other packages to be installed (jre, gcc-3.3, and other java packages) for me.
When the installation was complete, I went to the Eclipse site and downloaded the latest Eclipse version for Linux, in the time was Eclipse 3.3.2, from here.
After the download was completed, I changed to a terminal and entered in my root account. With root privileges, I sent the eclipse package to the /root directory and unpacked it with the command “tar -zxvf ./eclipse-java-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz”. With the new directory /root/eclipse, I sent it to the /usr/lib with the command “mv /root/eclipse /usr/lib” and created a symbolic link to the eclipse application on the /usr/lib/eclipse directory with the command “ln –symbolic /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse”. With this last command, we add a link to call eclipse inside a PATH that is already in our system variable allowing us to call it as a simple command in the console (try it by exiting the root account and using yours type the command “eclipse”, in an gui console).
It’s done, but, if you want to create a menu entry you can access the “Main Menu” software on “Preferences” and add an entry where you would like using the option “New Item”, for me I created on the Programming sub menu, below my entry for eclipse:
I hope this tutorial helps you out installing the Eclipse manually on Ubuntu. I like this way, because I can choose what version, when and where I would like to install it, and manually take care of it.
Best Regards!
