Contact me!

This little problem of Eclipse 3.x on Ubuntu 7+ crashing once in awhile… wait, sorry, make that every few minutes… has been driving me nuts. The good news is a simple workaround exists: launching Eclipse from the command line.

Here’s an explanation, although the solution below is specific to Eclipse 3.2.

If you’re running Eclipse 3.3 like me, these instructions explain how to use the Equinox launcher.

Or if you’re in a rush, simply cut and paste this script, modify to your needs, chmod +x, execute from a terminal window, and you’re rolling:

#!/bin/bash
# set path to eclipse folder. If local folder, use '.'; otherwise, use /path/to/eclipse/
eclipsehome="/opt/eclipse";
 
# get path to equinox jar inside $eclipsehome folder
cp=$(find $eclipsehome -name "org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_*.jar" | sort | tail -1);
 
# start Eclipse w/ java /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.5.0_15/bin/java -cp $cp org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main ...