Installing Eclipse 4.2.3 (Kepler) on Ubuntu 14.04

Hi all,

If you’ve followed any of my other posts you’ll know I recently wiped my OS (something I do alarmingly regularly) – as such, I’m reinstalling a bunch of stuff. Given that I do this so often, it makes sense for me to have a repository of tutorials for doing so!

Today I’m on Eclipse – I’m by no means an Eclipse regular. I do most of my coding in Python and find Vim works well enough for most of what I need to do. RStudio for R, Vim/IPython for Python, but when I’m doing anything in Java (inc. Android stuff) I’ll go with Eclipse. Now installing Eclipse on Ubuntu is really easy – there’s a version in the software centre that’ll work just fine. However, if you want a more up to date version then there’s a degree of hacking about required. Let’s go:

Check you’ve got Java installed

Give this command a cheeky little run (from terminal – press Ctrl + shift + t to get terminal on the screen):

which java
java -version

If they both worked you should have seen the path to where your Java is installed (mine was /usr/bin/java) and the version of Java you have installed (1.7 OpenJDK for me). If both commands worked (gave you a path and a version) then excellent, carry on wayward son. It doesn’t matter if your results are different to mine, just keep trooping on. If they didn’t work, you’ll want to install Java before continuing. I’ll not deal with that here but I mention how to do so in my post on installing Hadoop on Ubuntu.

Download Eclipse

As with installing Hadoop, there are a couple of ways to do this. I’m going to advise heading on over to the Eclipse download link:

Eclipse

Pick the top version (Eclipse standard) and decide which bit version you want (32 or 64). If you don’t know which you should be using, I’d advise running the following command:

 uname -a | awk '{print $12}' 

If the output is

x86_64

you’ll likely want 64 bit,

i386

tells me you’re after 32 bit. If it says something else entirely then I’m flummoxed – have a Google around to find out what bit your Ubuntu installation is.

If you’ve not got a GUI then I’m going to decide you shouldn’t be installing Eclipse. Wget the .tar.gz file if that’s you but really, what are you doing? Actually, maybe you’re setting up a bunch of computers over SSH which will have monitors in the future but don’t now. OK – wget this link if you’re on 64 bit:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/kepler/SR2/eclipse-standard-kepler-SR2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz&r=1

and this link if you’re not:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/kepler/SR2/eclipse-standard-kepler-SR2-linux-gtk.tar.gz&r=1

Installing Eclipse

At this point I’m assuming you’ve got a tarred Eclipse in your downloads folder and you know where Java is installed.

Open up a terminal, head over to your downloads directory and untar the Eclipse file:

cd ~/Downloads
tar -xzf eclipse-standard-kepler-SR2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

Next we’re going to put it into a more sensible directory and make it easily launchable from terminal:

sudo mv eclipse /usr/local/eclipse
sudo ln -s /usr/local/eclipse/eclipse /usr/bin/eclipse

At this point, if you could kindly run the following command from terminal:

 eclipse 

I’d expect you to see Eclipse pop up and for you to be able to start developing.