Getting Eclipse to work on 64-bit Linux

Back at the beginning of the summer, I was experiencing strange Eclipse crashes after an upgrade to 64-bit Ubuntu. My solution at the time was to switch over to Netbeans, which worked out very nicely.

Since students here at YCP are using Eclipse for Java development, I thought I'd take another stab at getting things working.

As it turns out, there is an easy solution: use the IBM JDK. Instructions are in a comment in the following blog post:

http://dmartin.org/weblog/eclipse-on-ubuntu-linux-for-amd64

Basically, you grab the RPM for the IBM JDK, use alien to install it, then use the -vm Eclipse switch to launch it using the IBM JVM.

W00t!

Since the problem seems to be in the Sun JVM, and not Eclipse, I have to wonder why Sun has let this bug linger for such a long time.