How to install Eclipse in Linux

Eclipse is a an IDE i.e Integrated Development Environment tool mostly used by developers for JAVA development. This tool support development in a number of languages like C, C++, COBOL, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. and also supports plugins which can let you develop projects in a number of other languages as well.

Eclipse SDK is free and open source software released under the terms of the Eclipse Public License. In this tutorial, I will explain you how to install this IDE in your Linux based system. All the steps are successfully tested on Ubuntu 11.10 and Eclipse 3.7.1.

Instructions:

1. Download Eclipse package from their website. You must select a version according to your need like if you want to develop C/C++ applications then you must select Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers, if you want to develop applications if JAVA, then you must select Eclipse IDE for JAVA Developers or Eclipse IDE for JAVA EE Developers and if you want to develop applications in third-party languages like Android from Google or some other language plugins, then you must select Eclipse Classic.
2. Now open your Terminal application, move to the directory where you have downloaded eclipse archive using cd command and extract the package downloaded using the tar command. In my case the command is as follows

   tar xzf eclipse-SDK-3.7.1-linux-gtk.tar.gz

   

   Extract Eclipse

   Change the name of file eclipse-SDK-3.7.1-linux-gtk.tar.gz with the one you just downloaded.

3. You can also extract the package by right clicking and then selecting Extract Here.
4. After extracting, move the extracted directory to /opt/ directory/. After that change the owner of the directory to root using chown command recursively (by using -R option with chown command) and then add read permission to all the directories and files present in the Eclipse directory by using chmod command with -R option.

   sudo mv eclipse /opt/
   sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
   sudo chmod -R +r eclipse

   

   Move Eclipse to /opt/ Directory

   

   Change Permissions and Directory Owner

5. Now we need to create eclipse executable in /usr/bin/ directory with following commands and then we need to set its permissions to 755. Use the following command to create eclipse executable

   sudo gedit /usr/bin/eclipse

   Now place following command lines in the file opened in gedit

   #!/bin/sh
   #export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/mozilla/"
   export ECLIPSE_HOME="/opt/eclipse"
   $ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*

   After this use the following command to change executable file permission to 755

   sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse

   

   Creating Eclipse Executable

6. Now we need to create Gnome menu item for eclipse. Use the following command to create eclipse.desktop file in /usr/share/applications/ directory

   sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

   Paste in the following lines in that file and then save and quit gedit

   [Desktop Entry]
   Encoding=UTF-8
   Name=Eclipse
   Comment=Eclipse IDE
   Exec=eclipse
   Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
   Terminal=false
   Type=Application
   Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
   StartupNotify=true

   

   Create Gnome Menu Item

7. That’s all Eclipse is successfully installed in your system. You can launch it from command line using the following command

   /opt/eclipse/eclipse -clean &

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