What's your best Ubuntu and Eclipse setup for Java development?

Question

What're the best versions and configuration tricks for building a happy Java development environment with Eclipse on Ubuntu?

I'm at Ubuntu 8.10 and Eclipse Ganymede 3.4.2, so I'm behind on both fronts. With my current setup, Eclipse often slows to a crawl and I have to restart. I'd love to upgrade to the latest OS and IDE. However, I've heard bad stories about later versions of Eclipse running on later versions of Ubuntu, and I'd rather not spend time upgrading just to find that I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

My must-have plugins (which work on my current setup): - Subclipse - AspectJ - Jupiter

Nice to have: - Counterclockwise (which doesn't work for me on my current setup)

Anyone have a holy grail of versions and setup tricks to make things happy?

Answer 1

You most likely have too little memory. Consider getting as much as you can afford (or be allowed to).

I've run Eclipse 3.5 nicely under 8.10 for several months.

Are you absolutely certain you run under the Sun Java 6 JVM?

apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Answer 2

If you have the memory to spare, increase the max heap size allocated to Eclipse.

In eclipse_home/eclipse.ini, add a -XmxYYYm after the -vmargs line where YYY is the amount of memory. Example:

...
-vmargs
-Xms128m
-Xmx512m

Answer 3

I'm using Eclipse 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10 on amd64 and making heavy use of the plugin development environment (which is largely java) without any problems. (For the record, my workstation has 8GB of RAM, and I didn't need to set any -vmargs/-Xms/-Xmx.)

There was a slight issue with some of Eclipse's controls not working properly, but there's an easy workaround for it: http://mou.me.uk/2009/10/31/fixing-eclipse-in-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala/