Eclipse 3.3 of 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04
I have been running 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 for about two months now on a Dell Latitude D830. One of the broken pieces was Eclipse. There is a 3.2.x version in the repository, but I needed 3.3.x because Pydev requires 3.3. And besides, there always seem to be a lot of improvements in Eclipse even between minor versions.
Installing 3.3 on a 32-bit Ubuntu is trivial (you just download and unpack Eclipse in, say, $HOME/opt and create a little wrapper bash script in $HOME/bin to start eclipse). But trying this with 64-bit system just resulted in an Eclipse that died even if you looked at it wrong, or for no reason at all. I tried the sun-java6 in the repositories, the 32-bit version java in the repositories and even tried the 64-bit download from Sun. Nothing worked. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto a post where someone mentioned in a comment that they fixed this by installing IBM’s Java. I did not even know IBM has its own Java version.
So I installed IBM’s Java SE 6 64-bit AMD/Opteron/EM64T version, and changed my eclipse script to start with -vm argument that points to IBM’s Java, and now I finally have stable Eclipse.
