Installing Eclipse Luna on Debian

A really quick guide on installing Eclipse Luna on Debian.

If you’re on a fresh machine, and you’re downloading/installing Eclipse for the purposes of Java development, you’ll want to install the JDK. To get this going, I install the openjdk-7-jdk out of the apt repository.

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

After that finishes, or while, grab a copy of the Eclipse version that you need from the download page. Once it’s down, I normally extract it and then put it in a system-wide location (as opposed to just running it from my home directory).

$ tar -zxvf eclipse-*.tar.gz
$ sudo mv eclipse /opt

One little oddity before starting Eclipse up, I’ve had to apply a GTK setting. Prior to making this setting, Eclipse would crash!

Add the following lines to you /opt/eclipse/eclipse.ini file. Make sure it appears before the --launcher.appendVmargs directive.

--launcher.GTK_version
2