Which permissions does Eclipse need to run fine? (Vista / Domain)

Question

Hi,

I installed Eclipse and I have some trouble which refer to denied user permissions , as far as I can see. I am working on Vista inside an Windows domain. My user account is very restricted. My boss needs to input his admin pass everytime I need to install any application and even to establish new network connections through the firewall!

Here are some of the problems that occured:

• At eclipse startup Vista asks every time if I realy want to run it. It doesn't remember my decision.
• Eclipse doesn't remember my default workspace.
• I installed the BIRT plugin. After a second restart it doesn't work anymore. The BIRT perspective does not run fine.

I think I need more permissions. But which I needed to run eclipse fine?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For Eclipse it is very important to 'Install as Administrator' and 'Run as Administrator'. Depending on your UAC settings you have to tell Windows at install to do this so.

If Eclipse hasn't been installed as Administrator you have to reinstall it. Just right-click the Installer and chose 'Run as Administrator'. Later on you also have to start Eclipse as Administrator. In Windows 7 you can also tell Windows to always run a certain program as Administrator.

All the problems you have mentioned should be solved after doing so!

You should also attempt to loosen the UAC restrictions or completely disable UAC.

Answer 2

tharkun's answer is sort of correct but I just wanted to post a "more correct" answer for anyone else who finds this question in the future.

For some reason, Eclipse needs administrator privileges in Windows 7 and Windows Vista machines. To do this one time, right-click the Eclipse executable or shortcut and click "Run as administrator"; to make it permanent, go to properties, the compatibility tab, and check the "Run this program as an administrator" box.

Despite tharkun's post, perhaps he forgot, Eclipse doesn't have an installer; you simply unzip it. There is no reinstallation necessary. If you run Eclipse normally and find something wrong, and just discovered this answer, you can safely run Eclipse as administrator from now on and nothing will be broken as a result of you not having run as administrator up until this point.

The problems with Eclipse that require administrator mode do not show up immediately, but for example if you check for updates with Eclipse running in non-administrator mode, Eclipse will claim that there are no update sites available. Also some GUI features will have problems.

These problems are likely caused by some of the advanced UAC features meant to protect your system, such as UAC Virtualization. Eclipse can (and hopefully will) be fixed to write only to user space and "play nice" with other Windows applications, but for now we have to simply run it as administrator and trust that it's not taking advantage of the added privileges.

As a sidenote, I just spent several hours trying to figure out how to get Eclipse to write inside the %AppData% directory, in hopes that it would solve this problem and allow Eclipse to be run in user mode, but I could not get Eclipse to honor anything I tried. Oh well...