Fedora Core 4 + Eclipse

In the process of migrating all my development procedures, etc, I’ve run into a few snags. The biggest one so far had the unhealthy result of losing about 9000 lines of code from a project — the entire project!

I installed FC4 with Eclipse from the FC4 CDs. When I loaded up Eclipse, I found that it was a severly hacked version and I couldn’t get several plugins to work properly. I uninstalled Eclipse and install the real 3.1 package from eclipse.org and it seemed to work. However, I created a new file and tried to save it, and got a “Save Failed: org.eclipse.core.internal.utils.UniversalUniqueIdentifier” error. Through the course of trying to work around that, I managed to get my entire project workspace deleted.

The fix was relatively simple once I had some sleep and stopped cursing at Torvalds, McNeely, Gates, and anyone else I could think of.

Step 1: Uninstall FC4’s default JVM (and all related packages). This is interesting since there are a lot of dependancies, but eventually, you’ll clean it all out.

Step 2: Backup your projects (if you have any left) and delete your ~/.eclipse and workspace directories.

Step 3: Uninstall Eclipse - entirely.

Step 4: Install the real JRE from java.com. You may have to put in some symlinks so paths work, etc.

Step 5: Install the Eclipse package from eclipse.org

That will get you going and able to save files. Have fun programming.