[news.eclipse.newcomer] Eclipse on Gentoo

[ejoftheweb <edward@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

After much poking around, it seems that there is a problem with running 
Eclipse using JVMs compiled from source on Gentoo as these systems do 
not appear to support file-locking.

The solution is to use a binary jvm from Sun, and use portage and one of 
the ebuilds in /usr/portage/dev-java/sun-jdk to install it (not the 
source ebuilds in /usr/portage/dev-java/sun-j2sdk!!)

emerge sync to update your portage tree.

Download the sun binary jvm, e.g. j2sdk_1_4_2_07-linux-i586.bin

cp j2sdk_1_4_2_07-linux-i586.bin /usr/portage/distfiles
emerge =sun-jdk-1.4.2.07
/usr/sbin/env-update && source /etc/profile
emerge -C eclipse-sdk
echo "dev-util/eclipse-sdk ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge eclipse-sdk

[with thanks to inode77 on the gentoo forums for this advice]

Unless this is the only jvm on the machine, you still need to force 
eclipse to use it, because for some reason the eclipse executable seems 
to ignore the settings for the system jvm that you might have set using 
java-config, so for example:

eclipse-3 -vm /opt/sun-jdk-1.4.2.07/bin/java

 on the command line or in your menu file.

Anyway this now works for me...