Richard A. Johnson

It all started a couple of weeks ago, issues with getting Eclipse 3.4 installed on my machine that is. I am running Kubuntu Jaunty 64-bit and noticed that I was having issues with Eclipse 3.4. The issues seem to have stemmed from Xulrunner but the errors I located in /path/to/workspace/.metadata/.log said nothing about Xulrunner that I could find. It seemed to be issues with SWT. I went nuts, installing everything from the build-deps of the old Eclipse in the repos, to installing each and every libswt package known to man.

Well today I finally got fed up and decided to dig into it. Hell, not much digging was needed, because the first link I found had the answer. Simply export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME to the location of Firefox prior to firing up Eclipse. Are you kidding me? That was it? Yes it was.

So here is how I set it up to work for me:

1. Go to eclipse.org and download the Eclipse Classic 3.4.x 64-bit version.
2. Extract the tarball (ie. tar -xf eclipse*.tar.gz)
3. Move the eclipse directory to /opt/ (ie. mv eclipse/ /opt/)
4. Create the file /usr/local/bin/eclipse and make it executable (ie. sudo touch /usr/local/bin/eclipse && chmod +x /usr/local/bin/eclipse).
5. Add the following lines to the /usr/local/bin/eclipse:

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/firefox-3.0.7
/opt/eclipse/eclipse

That was it. Make sure that your installation of Firefox 3.0.x is correct in the export line and all should be good. Hope this helps any of you who were facing this problem or maybe who will face this problem in the future.