Walk Alone

I don’t think anyone needs an introduction to Eclipse. I had been putting off its deployment on my home machine for the most trivial of reasons - laziness. Well, I installed it today.

First and foremost, I must say, go for the latest. No matter which Linux distribution you use (or OS for that matter), go for Eclipse 3.3, Europa, the latest version of Eclipse out there. I tried to install PDT on Eclipse 3.2, Callisto, which was smoothly installed via Synaptic. PDT requires WST 2.0.0. Callisto offered 1.5.0, I think. So, Europa is the only way to go.

If you are on a 64 bit system, go for the 64 bit builds from the downloads page. The page detects your OS and architecture, just in case you don’t care to check it yourself. At the very least, your Eclipse and JVM should be of the same architecture. Sun’s Java is preferred. I know. I kept trying to install a 32 bit Eclipse build on a 64 bit system with a 64 bit JVM. Typical case of PEBKAC.

Well, first, I put in Sun JDK 6. These three commands from the Eclipse page of the Community Ubuntu Documentation did the trick. Th last two commands ensure that, if you have more than one JVMs, Sun Java comes first.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
sudo update-java-alternatives --list
sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-6-sun

Then, it was time to install the plugins - PDT (PHP), EPIC (Perl), QuantumDB (MySQL), JSEclipse (Javascript) and Subclipse (SVN). QuantumDB requires the JDBC driver for your choice of database. For the rest, dependencies are satisfied by Eclipse’s plugin installation utility. Just select the Europa Discovery site along with the plugin’s own update site. When the dependencies crop up, expand all the sections of the Discovery site. Then click the ‘Select Required’ button and the required dependencies get selected. Slick - the closest anything has ever got to the apt-get utility.

And you are all set to get more productive.