Problem Installing Eclipse on Ubuntu

Question

I downloaded the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers Linux 32 Bit file from here.

I extracted the file and launched eclipse from the command line.

Instead of Eclipse starting I get this message in a dialog box:

VM terminated. Exit code=13
/usr/bin/java
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx384m
-jar /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
-os linux
-ws gtk
-arch x86
-showsplash
-launcher /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/eclipse
-name Eclipse
--launcher.library /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_1.1.1.R36x_v20100810/eclipse_1309.so
-startup /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
-exitdata 420021
-product org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
-vm /usr/bin/java
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx384m
-jar /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar 

Any ideas how to fix this? I'm on Ubuntu 8.10 64bit and here's my Java info:

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_0"
IcedTea6 1.3.1 (6b12-0ubuntu6.7) Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_0-b12)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_0-b12, mixed mode)

Answer 1

First thing is to ensure you're running the java you think you're running. You can tell from your error output that it's using /usr/bin/java so run

/usr/bin/java -version

to check the version. That java is not necessarily the one on your path - you can find out which one that is with:

which java

Second thing you should probably try is the 64bit version of Eclipse. Everything else you have is 64bit.

Beyond that, I had all sorts of trouble early on with non-Sun JREs. That may not be the case now (or it may have been only specific to me) but it's something else you may want to look at.

---

On top of that (and probably unrelated to the problem at hand), do you really want to be running Eclipse from within your Firefox download directory. I would move it somewhere else personally.