Install Eclipse on GNOME 3

Introduction

I will install Eclipse and add an entry to GNOME to make Eclipse an application. I use the “Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developpers” version and I’m currently using GNOME 3.10.

Download and install Eclipse

To download Eclipse, you can go to http://eclipse.org/downloads/. Once it’s downloaded, you can extract it to /opt/. You should have the binary of Eclipse in /opt/eclipse/eclipse. You may extract Eclipse into /opt/eclipse-4.3.0 and create a symbolic link; this way, you can easily install a new version of eclipse by just modifying the link.

$ cd /opt
$ ln -s eclipse-4.3.0/ eclipse

Download a SVG icon for Eclipse

In order to make a cute icon in the GNOME launcher, we can also download an icon (in SVG format) for Eclipse.

$ cd /opt/eclipse/
$ curl -o /usr/share/pixmaps/eclipse.svg https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/plain/trunk/eclipse.svg\?h\=packages/eclipse

Create the launcher for GNOME

To create the launcher, you need to create the following file /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Version=4.3.0
Type=Application
NoDisplay=false
Exec=/opt/eclipse/eclipse
Name=Eclipse
Comment=Launcher for Eclipse
Icon=eclipse

This is it. You can now try it!

References

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