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SPP Open Source: Eclipse under debian
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from an email from Stuart...

I've been having some difficultly getting eclipse working on my new kit, which is running debian unstable. Here's how I finally got everything working. I'd be keen to hear about successes or failures of other people installing on debian.

Installing eclipse under debian

  1. [as root] Use apt-get to install eclipse. apt-get is a program which normally installs programs on debian machines.
  2. [as root] Copy the libswt.*.so libraries from /usr/lib/eclipse to /usr/lib/ These are the only parts of the standard install we're going to use, and putting them in /usr/lib makes them accessible by default to all normal programs.
  3. [as root] remove any java and ant executables that might be in the standard paths. This is so that "bad" versions of these cannot be found by accident. They can be found with "which ant" and "which java".
  4. [as root] Run "chmod a+w /usr/share/tomcat4/webapps/". This allows everyone to install and delete webapps. Doing this on a production system is almost certainly a bad idea.
  5. [as a user] Download and install current versions of java and ant. I used j2sdk1.4.2_03 and apache-ant-1.5.4 and installed them to /home//java
    DO NOT use j2sdk1.4.1. If you get internal virtual machine errors, you are running the wrong version of java.
  6. [as a user] Add the .../bin directory of the new java install to your PATH
  7. [as a user] Set JAVA_HOME and ANT_HOME to point to the new installs
  8. [as a user] Install eclipse from the eclipse website, I installed to /home//java/eclipse
  9. [as a user] follow Francisco's install instructions, deploying the webapp, adapting paths as necessary.
  10. [as a user] if steps 5-9 work, add make sure you add the changes to PATH, JAVA_HOME and ANT_HOME to your .bashrc or similar, to make them permanent.
  11. [as root] copy the xerces .jar files from the xerces plugin dirctory to /usr/share/tomcat4/common/lib
  12. [as root] restart tomcat with /usr/share/tomcat4/bin/shutdown.sh && /usr/share/tomcat4/bin/startup.sh
  13. point your browser to http://localhost:8180/spp/

Possible problems:

If ant gives an error configuring the XML parser, ensure that the jar files from the eclipse xerces plugin are the first jar files in the ant include path.

It can appear that there are two tomcat installs on debain machines, one in /usr/share/tomcat4 and one in /var/lib/tomcat4. /usr/share/tomcat4 holds the actual install, while /var/lib/tomcat4 holds the variable content (webapps, logs, databases...). The two are linked using symbolic links, the command "ls -lart" is very useful in showing which files are symbolic links and where they go to.