Linux Fedora 15 - Install Eclipse SDK 3.7 (Indigo)
Andre Honsberg is a software engineer who develops mostly for the Web. He lives in Hamburg Germany and works building software for the web using a wide spectrum of different technologies.
In this guide I will go over how to install Eclispe SDK 3.7 Indigo on a Fedora 15 Linux operating system. This guide should work on all RedHat like Linux distributions since none of the instruction require distribution specific settings. Eclipse is an awesome IDE used for multiple languages.
In order to run Eclipse you need to have Oracle Java JDK 6 or later installed. To download Eclipse go to Eclipse Download Page. Download the version called Eclipse Classic or choose the version that best fits your development needs. In this article the version we are dealing with is Eclipse Classic 3.7.
Once you have the file downloaded, open up a terminal and enter the following commands:
# become root su
Now we need to extract Eclipse to the /opt directory so enter the directory you downloaded Eclipse to and enter:
# 32-bit system tar -zxvf eclipse-SDK-3.7-linux-gtk.tar.gz -C /opt # 64-bit system tar -zxvf eclipse-SDK-3.7-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz -C /opt
Now we need to give the whole Eclipse directory reading permissions:
chmod -R +r /opt/eclipse
We definitely want to be able to see Eclipse in the menus in our windows manager and we want the program to be available from the command line. So we need to add a shortcut to /usr/bin and create a Gnome Launcher for the file to appear in the Applications menu under Development.
touch /usr/bin/eclipse chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse
Use a command line editor to edit the file you just created:
nano /usr/bin/eclipse
Now paste the following into the file or write it out.
#!/bin/sh export ECLIPSE_HOME="/opt/eclipse" $ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*
Create a new file in /usr/share/applications/ called eclipse.desktop
nano /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop
At last, we now paste in the following few lines into eclipse.desktop to finish the process.
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Eclipse Comment=Eclipse SDK 3.7 Exec=eclipse Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=GNOME;Application;Development; StartupNotify=true
Now you can start Eclipse normally from the menu or running the command
eclipse
