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Update 12/04/08: I have now successfully installed the x64 version of Eclipse - see 64 Bit Eclipse: Linux Installation, including PDT, WTP (WST), ATF, and MySQL (SQL Explorer Plugin) for a step by step guide, or continue reading this article if you want to install the 32 bit version.
32 Bit installation
I went through several different methods of installing the Eclipse IDE on my Ubuntu system. I tried the obvious first - installing via the Synaptic Package Manager, but found it a bit of a pain to install any plugin packages I downloaded (I also use WST and SqlExplorer in addition to PDT). So, I uninstalled, then tried the 64 Bit version of the SDK (which at the time was pretty buggy, and unstable), in the hope that I’d be able to plug in a 64 Bit version of the PDT, which I soon found doesn’t exist yet! So, I finally settled for installing the 32 Bit version of Eclipse PDT, which enabled me to install the plugins too.
In order to install and run this successfully, I first downloaded the 32 Bit Java Runtime Environment installer “Linux (self-extracting file)” from http://www.java.com/en/download/linux_manual.jsp (or direct link to the file), and saved the jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin to my desktop.
Once the file downloaded, I opened up a Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal), and typed
cd /usr/java
(if the java directory doesn’t exist, it need to be created:
sudo mkdir /usr/java
cd /usr/java
I also wanted a 64 bit version of the JRE installing, so within the /usr/java directory, created two more sub directories:
sudo mkdir 32
sudo mkdir 64
then copied the newly downloaded JRE installation file from the desktop to the /usr/java/32 directory, and made the file executable:
cd 32
sudo mv ~/Desktop/jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin /usr/java/32/jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin
sudo chmod a+x jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin
then execute the binary:
sudo ./jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin
Accept the terms, and so on and so forth… When it says “Done”, it’s, well, done!
ls
should return:
jre1.6.0_03
Note: If you download a newer version of JRE, then you’ll need to change the above commands containing “jre-6u3-linux-i586.bin” to “jre-6u<version>-linux-i586.bin” where <version> is 3, 4, 5 etc.!
Now for Eclipse. I downloaded the latest version from http://download.eclipse.org/tools/pdt/downloads/ (the current stable version is R20080103) - I click on the link for the latest release, and downloaded the pdt-all-in-one-R20080103-linux-gtk.tar.gz file to the desktop. Once it finished, I went back to the terminal, and entered the /opt directory, moved the Eclipse package to the /opt directory, and extracted the new files:
cd /opt
sudo mv ~/Desktop/pdt-all-in-one-R20080103-linux-gtk.tar.gz /opt
sudo tar -zxvf pdt-all-in-one-R20080103-linux-gtk.tar.gz
This extracts the Eclipse IDE into a directory called, oddly enough, “eclipse”. However, I’m experimenting with the 64 bit version too, so I changed the directory name to eclipse32:
sudo mv eclipse eclipse32
As it was, Eclipse wouldn’t run, since it doesn’t know where to find the JRE I’d just installed, so, I had to create a small shell script in order for it to run correctly:
cd eclipse32
gksu gedit eclipse.sh
This opened up a text editor, with a blank file called “eclipse.sh”. The shell script is:
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/java/32/jre1.6.0_03/bin:$PATH
/opt/eclipse32/eclipse
PATH=/usr/java/32/jre1.6.0_03/bin:$PATH should point to the bin directory of the previously installed.
The script also needed to be executable:
sudo chmod 755 eclipse.sh
and I also changed the ownership of all the files and directories to my username:
sudo chown -R username:group *
That was pretty much it - I could run Eclipse by opening a Terminal window and running
cd /opt/eclipse32
./eclipse.sh
which got a little tiresome after the first time, so I created a menu item (System -> Preferences -> Main Menu) which pointed to /opt/eclipse32/eclipse.sh, and even included the png Eclipse logo for the icon 
Any plugins can be downloaded, and extracted into the relevant directories - or, installed by the Eclipse Update Manager.
I’ve recently written a post on “Eclipse PDT and MySQL - SQL Explorer Plugin“, for anyone who needs to set up MySQL connections in Eclipse.
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