Install Eclipse Galileo (3.5) on Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04)

Fri, Jun 26, 2009 #python #Ubuntu #pydev #eclipse #clojure #mercurial

Eclipse 3.5, codenamed "Galileo," was released this week! While there is a team actively working on building an Ubuntu deb package, they do not yet have a package yet for Eclipse 3.5. I put together some super simple instructions for installing Eclipse 3.5.

I am going to perform a per-user installation into my home-directory. If multiple people use eclipse on the same computer, you may want to modify these instructions to install into /opt/. I am going to put the installable in ~/bin/packages/eclipse3.5. First, create the installation directory (change according to your own tastes)

mkdir -p ~/bin/packages
cd ~/bin/packages

Now download the appropriate tar.gz file from eclipse. I am going to grab them from Amazon's Cloudfront.

For 64-bit Ubuntu:

wget http://d2u376ub0heus3.cloudfront.net/galileo/eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

For standard 32-bit Ubuntu:

wget http://d2u376ub0heus3.cloudfront.net/galileo/eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Now unzip, and rename the directory (I want multiple versions of Eclipse):

tar xzvf eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk*.tar.gz 
mv eclipse eclipse3.5

Great, almost there. I am going to create a file so that I can launch eclipse from the command line. Create a new file ~/bin/eclipse, and in that file, put:

#/bin/bash
`~/bin/packages/eclipse3.5/eclipse -vmargs -Xms128M -Xmx512M -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=512M &> /dev/null` &

(You can later change these values if you get out of memory issues from Eclipse.) Lastly, make the file executable:

chmod u+x ~/bin/eclipse

Install plugins

Yet again, Eclipse has changed its update manager (each time it gets better). I am going to add a few plugins for Python, Clojure, and Mercurial. If you go to Help > Install new software, click the "Available Software Sites" link, and add your update sites. For me they include:

Add Icon to the Panel I like having an icon on my panel to quickly launch Eclipse, like so:

Adding Eclipse to the toolbar

To do so, right click on your panel in a place with no other panel tool. Select "Add to Panel" then create a "Custom Application Launcher". You can enter /home/<USERNAME>/bin/eclipse (put in your username) as the command to run, and if you click the icon on the left, you can use the Eclipse icon in ~/bin/packages/eclipse3.5/.

Leave a comment if you run into issues or have a better method! You can also see my previous instructions for Eclipse 3.4, if you run into any issues--there were lots of great comments!