I wouldn’t guess it would be that hard to install Eclipse 3.4.2 ganymede in ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala. After searching a bit around web I concluded that it was not the way to go with sudo apt-get install eclipse this time.
Then I downloaded 3.4.2 from eclipse site, extracted it and started playing with it. First command trial was ./eclipse. After issuing this command eclipse failed with an empty dialog after showing splash screen in a few seconds. First googling around the net revealed that I should have run it with giving -vm argument or by putting it into eclipse.ini in order not to type later on.
./eclipse -vm /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_17/bin/java
After showing splash screen eclipse failed again but this time error dialog was showing where to find the cause of error: /home/ksevindik/workspace/.metadata/.log.
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467259
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1638)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:312)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.(Browser.java:118)
Uh! Again I needed to refer to google for it. And this time I reached at this page which suggests first to install xulrunner with sudo apt-get install xulrunner, and then to add -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner/xulrunner into eclipse.ini. Bingo! Eclipse starts now without any error, at least for the moment…