64 Bit Jungle

While aimlessly wandering the web yesterday, I happened upon a rather cool little plugin for Eclipse, called AnyEdit tools, which adds a bunch of useful tools to the context menu of the Eclipse editor, and also to the output consoles, main menu and editor toolbar. Most interestingly for me, is the addition to the context menu which allows opening an included file from the within Editor, which means I don’t have to search through directory structures in the Eclipse explorer to open a file included in the one I’m currently editing. With AnyEdit tools, I just right-click on the include/require statement, and select “Open file under cursor” (Ctrl+Alt+R does the same), and the file is opened in the editor. Cool.

AnyEdit tools is easy to install - in Eclipse, go to Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install and select the “Search for ne features to install” option. Click on “New Remote Site”, and add “AnyEdit tools” as the Name, and http://andrei.gmxhome.de/eclipse/ as the URL and click OK. Tick the box next to the new site, and click Finish. Once the update site has been contacted, and the plugin list retrieved, expand the AnyEdit tools -> Eclipse 3.3 plugins, and select AnyEditTools 2.0.2. Click Next, accept the agreement, Next, Next, Finish. Once dowloaded, the Update Manager asks to verify the installation - click Install, and that’s it. Eclipse needs restarting to activate the plugin.

written by Hodge \\ tags: Eclipse, Programming

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.

written by Hodge \\ tags: Eclipse IDE, Eclipse PDT, IDE, Java, MySQL, PHP, Programming, Ubuntu