Gfilui

I installed Eclipse last night (from the manual installer downloaded from the website, not the Software Center), and this morning I try to launch it, and it doesn't show up when I type "Eclipse" into the search bar. I remember that when I installed it, I stuck it in the default installation directory of /root/eclipse/javascript-oxygen2. I try going into that folder, but access is denied to /root. Did I screw up? What should I do if I want to be able to run Eclipse?

My installation procedure:

1. Went to this page and downloaded the 32-bit Linux installer, eclipse-inst-linux32.tar.gz.


2. In that archive was a binary file. I opened a terminal and sudo ran the binary.


3. A graphical installation program started and I installed Eclipse into the default location specified above.


4. The installation program offered to launch Eclipse automatically, so I did so, used it for a few minutes, then closed the program and turned off the computer.

Short answer

Run the installer binary without sudo. Either double-click it in the file manager or, in terminal, (inside the directory containing the binary) run:

./eclipse-inst

The installer should default to your user's home directory.

Long answer

When running the binary with sudo, it is (loosely speaking) executed by the root user. The installer detects the current user's home directory, which in case of the root user is /root/ and defaults to install eclipse there. While you could change it to your own user's home directory, you probably won't be able to use eclipse because the files and folders created by the installer (running as root) will most likely only be accessible to the root user.
Please note that, although you can use the eclipse installed in /root/ folder by executing it as root user, you should not do so because of the obvious security risks when running applications with root permissions.

When you install the javascript-oxygen project, even if you install it outside the root directory, it seems to store some libraries in /root/.p2 that are needed to run eclipse. The installer appears to be designed to work for a single user, and even then it doesn't add the eclipse command to the path. I really don't see any advantage to using the installer over the getting standard tarball, extracting it where you want it, and symlinking the binary to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.

If you still want to install the latest eclipse into the system using an installer, take a look at ubuntu-make, there are eclipse specific instructions here.