Eclipse Fails It

Man, Eclipse works great on Debian! It gives me this cool message on startup:

JVM terminated. Exit code=127
/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
-Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.2/classmap.db
-Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never
-Dosgi.locking=none
-jar /usr/lib/eclipse/startup.jar
-os linux
-ws gtk
-arch x86
-launcher /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse
-name Eclipse
-showsplash 600
-exitdata 3a0015
-install /usr/lib/eclipse
-vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/bin/java
-vmargs
-Djava.library.path=/usr/lib/jni
-Dgnu.gcj.precompiled.db.path=/var/lib/gcj-4.2/classmap.db
-Dgnu.gcj.runtime.VMClassLoader.library_control=never
-Dosgi.locking=none
-jar /usr/lib/eclipse/startup.jar

After uninstalling, reinstalling, changing which JVM I was using, uninstalling, reinstalling, googling, yahooing, and binging, I finally found this post over at Debian Help that instructed me to first install XULRunner. With the addition of this simple step, everything suddenly worked great.

The strange part about the whole thing is that Eclipse doesn’t install XULRunner as a dependency, and the Wikipedia article about XULRunner doesn’t mention Eclipse anywhere. I don’t really understand their relationship, aside from the fact that Eclipse supports plugins that may or may not be written on top of XULRunner.

Regardless of their strange and undocumented relationship, the Eclipse/XULRunner combo seem to work perfectly, allowing me to create Java, C/C++, and Plugin projects out of the box. Next steps include adding plugins for Subversion, Python, and PHP.