Installing Eclipse 3.7 on openSuSE 11.4

Installing Eclipse has been covered fairly well in a number of other places, but I wanted to outline all of the steps completely. First, install the Sun JRE YaST Software Management. It is part of the non-OSS repository, so you might have to add that into your repository configuration first.

After you have installed the JRE, set the version of Java to use by running:

sudo /usr/sbin/update-alternatives --config java

and selecting the number corresponding to the Sun JRE. If you run java -version, you should see the version you just set.

Now, download Eclipse from www.eclipse.org using the closest mirror. From what I've read, this seems to be better than trying to get it from the openSUSE repositories. When the file is downloaded, extract it to the /usr/local/bin directory (or anywhere else  seems convenient for you). The easiest way to do that is run Dolphin as root by hitting Alt+F2 and then typing kdesu dolphin in the command prompt. After extracting, test by running the program from the command line: /usr/local/bin/eclipse/eclipse.

You should see Eclipse launch. To make things easier, create a menu entry by right-clicking on the Kickoff Application Launcher in the bottom left corner of the screen (the lizard) and select Edit Applications... to show the KDE Menu Editor.

Create a new entry under development for Eclipse and select Save. You should now be able to launch Eclipse from the menu.