Eclipse is perhaps the most common IDE to play with for beginners. It offers a great user interface, has a ton of helpful features that let you up to speed in no time and is compatible with quite a lot of programming languages.

It is not only good at creating applications but also has a host of useful features that’ll help you be more productive. There are even inbuilt GUI builders that help a lot with things like charting, modelling, testing etc.

In this article, we show you how to install Eclipse on your Linux distro so you can get up and running in no time.

Also read: 9 reasons why developers tend to choose Linux over Windows

Installing Eclipse on Linux

Installing the IDE is actually quite simple, but there are a couple of things you need to take care of first.

Installing JDK

Eclipse requires JDK 8 or above installed to function properly. The quickest way to do so is to install JDK using a third-party PPA. However, we recommend doing a proper Java installation with the latest update of Java.

You can refer to this article for instructions on how to install Java – java Linux link

Should you decide to go with the quick approach, here’s how

Fire up a terminal and enter these commands:

Step 1: Adding the PPA to your repository list

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

Step 2: Installing JDK

sudo update

sudo apt install oracle-java8-installer

This will download and start the JDK 8 installer. Simply follow along and make sure that JDK8 is set as default. You can check the JDK version by typing javac -version in the terminal.

Step 3: Set JDK as default

sudo apt install oracle-java8-set-default

Now that you’ve installed Java, we can move on to installing Eclipse.

Installing Eclipse

Step 1: Head over to the Eclipse website and download the installer.

Step 2: Extract the downloaded package to the /opt/ directory as follows

cd /opt

sudo tar -xvzf ~[directory where you’ve downloaded the archive]

Step 3: Open up a new terminal to create a shortcut file for Eclipse

gedit eclipse.desktop

In the gedit, type in the following

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Eclipse
Type=Application
Exec=/opt/eclipse/eclipse
Terminal=false
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Comment=Integrated Development Environment
NoDisplay=false
Categories=Development;IDE;
Name[en]=Eclipse
Name[en_US]=Eclipse

Save and close the gedit.

Step 4: Enter the following command in the terminal to install Eclipse

sudo desktop-file-install eclipse.desktop

Also read: How to check the OS version in Linux?