How to install Eclipse 3.7 on Ubuntu 11.04

The Eclipse packages in Ubuntu are are very out of date. The latest version in the Ubuntu repos is 3.5.2 where as the latest version of Eclipse is 3.7. I’m posting this because Ubuntu 11.04 uses the new Unity desktop which uses overlay-scrollbars (scrolls bars that are hidden until you hover over them). For some reason Eclipse 5.3.2 doesn’t like to play nice with the overlay scrollbars, and I’d rather use the newest version anyways. With Eclipse, you can just download the tar.gz file from eclipse.org and run it no problem, but I like set things up in a cleaner fashion, so here’s how I did it.

1) Download Eclipse. I got eclipse-SDK-3.7-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

2) Extract it

tar xzf eclipse-SDK-3.7-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz

Or just be lazy and Right Click > Extract Here

3) Move to /opt/ folder

mv eclipse /opt/
sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
sudo chmod -R +r eclipse

4) Create an eclipse executable in your path

sudo touch /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo nano /usr/bin/eclipse

copy this into nano

#!/bin/sh
#export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/mozilla/"
export ECLIPSE_HOME="/opt/eclipse"

$ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*

save the file (^O = Ctrl+o) and exit nano (^X = Ctrl+x)

5) Create a gnome menu item

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

copy this into nano

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Eclipse
Comment=Eclipse IDE
Exec=eclipse
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
StartupNotify=true

save and exit nano

6) Launch Eclipse for the first time

/opt/eclipse/eclipse -clean &