[news.eclipse.newcomer] Re: initial setup of eclipse on SUSE Linux

[mbg.nimda@xxxxxxxxx (nimda)]

Ted Byers wrote:

> First, understand that while I have programmed computers, running various 
> flavours of DOS, Windows and OS/2, and have occassionally used a couple 
> different flavours of Unix, I have never administered or configured a unix 
> machine.

> I now have a new Acer notebook on which I have installed SUSE Linux v 10 
> (the 64 bit version).  I have not seen any problems I couldn't deal with 
> except for one I am now encountering with eclipse.  

> SUSE Linux appears to come with a very recent version of eclipse (version 
> 3.1.2 I believe).

I recently installed SUSE 10, because my old Red Hat 9 failed to install 
on my new box because of an unrecognised hard disk type.

Now since a week I was wandering arounnd in the eclipse environment and 
everything works fine. 

> I get an error when I try to start it (eclipse).  When I open the log in 
> root/.eclipse/.metadata, 

This seems very suspicious to me. You have installed eclipse as user 
"root", haven't you. This is a very unnatural thing to do. "root", never 
installs an applications. One of the elemental things is that the PATH 
environment is commpletely different. So probably will be any reference to 
a Java library path.  

> I see two errors (and a trace) related to 
> libswt-pi-gtk-3138.so that say this file could not be opened because it 
> doesn't exist.

Yep, libswt-pi-gtk-3138.so, don't talk me about that one! I've spent half 
a day on that error, but that was just because I was trying to run  a .jar 
file as a standalone .jar file with a class developed using SWT. 


What SUSE version are you using? 


> I have, so far, done nothing to eclipse, so what is there is what was put 
> there by YaST.  When I did the install using YaST, I told it to install 
> ALL of the development tools.  I am, after all, a software developer used 
> to using a wide variety of tools (but mostly my experience configuring 
> them is on Windows, W2K and XP, and OS/2), and intended to use this 
> machine for development and to learn more about developing Linux programs.

In fact, you  are not developing "linux programs", you are developing 
platform indepentend Java code. 

> I need a little help getting started with getting my Linux development 
> environment configured.  I still haven't found most of the documentation 
> for the various applications I had installed, so I am working blind!  I 
> would have RTFM by now if I could have found it!

It's freeware after all, so ther is nobody  really to blame :)


> Bearing in mind I am still trying to learn my way around Linux, I need 
> help first to solve this problem starting eclipse on Linux.  Then I will 
> need a little guidance in setting eclipse up to work with the other tools 
> I hope to use (e.g., the gcc suite of compilers, including especially the 
> C++ and fortran compilers in addition to Java).  I see several debuggers 
> and profilers have been installed.  Can any, or all, of them be integrated 
> with eclipse?  What about the glade interface designer?

> I had the aegis version control program installed.  How would I set up 
> eclipse to work nicely with it; automagically checking files in and out of 
> the archive, and possibly even managing the archive?

> BTW, as an aside, emacs seems to work fine, but I need similar guidance in 
> configuring IT to deal with the same issues I'm presently facing WRT 
> configuring eclipse!

> Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

> Thanks,

> Ted

email me at mbg dot nimda at gmail dot com