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

[r.ted.byers@xxxxxxxxxx (Ted Byers)]

nimda wrote:

> Ted Byers wrote:


> > 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.  

Actually no.  Root is included in the path only because I happened to have 
tried starting eclipse while I was signed on as root.  I have another uid 
that I'll be using when I'm doing my development, and when I start eclipse 
while using that uid, the error is the same except that the path to the 
log is defined relative to the home directory of that uid.

> > 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. 

I have now explored more of the directory tree, and in fact this file IS 
in the place where it is supposed to be: the path to it is precisely what 
appears in the error message.  So the problem isn't that the file doesn't 
exist, or that it is in the wrong place.  It is, instead, that eclipse is 
not finding it.

> What SUSE version are you using? 

This is the 64 bit version of SUSE Linux v 10.0.

> > 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. 

Right, when I am developing applications and applets using Java.  But I 
also develop programs in other languages, such as C++ and fortran.  And I 
expect to be praticing with a couple other languages such as PHP and Perl. 
I'd assumed that I could use eclipse for development in other languages 
if I told it, e.g. that I want to use the 'gcc' suite of compilers.  Was 
that assumption wrong?

> > 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 :)

And I am not blaming anyone.  i'm just pointing out that it would be 
useful if distributions of Linux, such as SUSE Linux, made it easier to 
find all the documentation revevant to both the OS and all the 
applications the user has selected for installation by YaST (say, a folder 
created by default on the desktop with links to all of the relevant 
documentation files).

I have also had experience with some Linux gurus whose stock answer to 
virtually every question was "RTFM".

Thanks.

Ted