Upgrading Eclipse 3.2 to 3.4
I was installing Eclipse via Synaptic Package Manager and loaded the PHPEclipse extension afterwards. Unfortunately there was a bug that prevented the PHP Editor from working. And as I saw there was an Eclipse 3.4 (codename: ganymede) release, I thought it is about time to upgrade. But how to do without the help of our beloved package manager? Too easy, really.
WARNING! Unfortunately it does seem to cause trouble with at least one installation so far. Please be aware this is no official upgrade guide but a workaround that worked for me and a lot of others, but no guarantee is given it will be working on your system. You take the risk and should at least backup folders that will be changed due to this guide. Also have a look onto the “Eclipse crashes on Ubuntu” story in my blog about ways to solve issues mainly related to default Ubuntu JAVA versions and incompatibility with Eclipse.
During that procedure I lost some of my previously installed plugins, but did not mind as they were not working properly anyway or I could easily install them again. Make sure you don’t have any important or personal files / projects in the eclipse folder. Normally the workspace is set to a separate folder by default.
- First of all you download the latest release from the eclipse download site.
- For the installation you simple copy the new eclipse package contents of the existing eclipse installation in /usr/lib/eclipse. Two choices here.
- Once that has finished you extract it in you download folder and than copy the folder to /usr/lib/.
cd /home/daniel/Downloads
tar xvzf eclipse-java-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
sudo cp -Rf /home/daniel/Downloads/eclipse /usr/lib/ - Or you extract it into /usr/lib/ right away.
cd /usr/lib/
sudo tar xvzf /home/daniel/Downloads/eclipse-java-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
- Once that has finished you extract it in you download folder and than copy the folder to /usr/lib/.
- Restart eclipse and that should give you a all new Eclipse experience.
I am still examining the features, but am pretty pleased so far, especially as PHPEclipse works again.
12 Comments
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By Justin Hernandez, September 3, 2008 @ 10:09 am
thanks
By Jack, September 16, 2008 @ 9:51 pm
Hi,
I fallow steps below, and when i launch eclipse i get this error message :
The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its
companion launcher jar.
I’m under ubuntu Feisty
Any ideas
Thanx
By Pete, October 15, 2008 @ 4:44 pm
Great job. Thank you.
I would have never expected such an easyness in upgrading eclipse, but didnt want to crash my old 3.2 on ubuntu hardy x64, so i’ve never tried … but it works, out of the box.
By Wojtek, October 27, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
Thank You. Now my Eclipse crushes every time just after the splash screen appears, and now even when I delete and reinstall it from the repository I cannot run it again. It looks like I’ll have to reinstall my system to get it back to work. THANK YOU.
By atentia, October 27, 2008 @ 10:23 pm
Hi Wojtek,
sorry to hear this destroyed your Eclipse environment. In a previous post I had described how I got to get Eclipse working in first place as there were issues due to JAVA version. I had to reinstall recently and ran into the same problems again, but when I got rid of the GNU JAVA versions and installed SUN JAVA 6 it did work for me again. Read it here, maybe helps: http://atentia.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/eclipse-crashes-on-ubuntu-804/
Also try sudo update-alternatives –config java
to configure the version of JAVA to be used as default.
By Raid, January 26, 2009 @ 1:30 am
To people having problems with this, try deleting the .eclipse folder in the ~ ( home ) directory of the user.
Worked for me.
Cheers!
By Paul Fodor, January 28, 2009 @ 4:53 pm
Hi,
My officemate upgraded to Eclipse 3.4 as you said in this post on our server.
Today I deleted my workspace and wanted to create a new workspace, but Eclipse started with an empty window.
I tried to remove eclipse:
sudo apt-get autoremove eclipse
and reinstall it:
sudo apt-get install eclipse
But I got an error that “the framework core cannot be started”.
Finally, I got the solution:
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/eclipse
And I have my old Eclipse 3.2 working.
I guess one can follow the instructions above to upgrade again to 3.4, but I think I will stick to 3.2 until I need some features that I can find only in 3.4
I hope this post will help the other people in the future.
Regards,
Paul.
By bookmunkie, March 17, 2009 @ 5:45 pm
Wojtek seems like one of those guys who would try to sue Garmin because he blindly followed his GPS until he drove into a lake.
Does nobody have an answer to Jack’s question? I’m having the same problem
By atentia, March 18, 2009 @ 1:46 am
Sorry bookmunkie, havent’ found an answer to Jacks and your problem yet. Probably because it did not occur to me, so hard to find something. Would apprecieate if you’d let me know when you got an answer to it.
Cheers
Daniel
By bookmunkie, March 18, 2009 @ 4:58 pm
Atentia,
I got an idea from another website that I’ve already forgotten the address of to replace the script /usr/bin/eclipse with a script with the same name that launches /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse
This had the dual benefit of fixing the link in the launcher menu as well
By bookmunkie, March 19, 2009 @ 12:43 am
I’ve found the URL of the other site I used: http://flurdy.com/docs/eclipse/install.html