Upgrading Eclipse on Ubuntu (from 3.5 to 3.7 indigo – works for other versions too)

After upgrading my Ubuntu version to 11.04 I installed eclipse using the software centre.

It turns out that only v3.5 of Eclipse is available (as the latest) from the software Centre.  I wanted to update to 3.7 but I wanted to keep all the links set up by the software centre e.g On the new Ubuntu “Start Page” or the new toolbar, in addition I want to be able to use the software centre to uninstall eclipse if the need arises.

Method 1

The first thing I recommend you try is going to “Help => Install Software”

Type in “http://download.eclipse.org/releases/indigo” then click “Add site”

Click okay on the dialog that shows and it’ll take some time to update the list

Go through and  try to upgrade…if it fails continually about dependencies then you should stop because this method probably won’t work… try the next one below.

Method 2

Install Eclipse through package manager /software centre (whatever version is available)

Download the latest version of eclipse from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Extract to a folder.

open terminal and do the following

#remove the  folder created by the software centre
rm -Rf /usr/lib/eclipse
#move your newly downloaded and extracted eclipse folder to replace the one you just deleted
sudo mv ~/Downloads/eclipse /usr/lib/eclipse
#optional and may cause issues – See this comment below for a possible fix
#sudo mv /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse.ini /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse.ini.bak
#sudo ln -s /etc/eclipse.ini /usr/lib/eclipse/eclipse.ini

Open /usr/bin/eclipse using
sudo gedit /usr/bin/eclipse

Replace old version name with the version you downloaded. E.g. If you downloaded Indigo and you have galileo installed then replace galileo with indigo using the text editor.

That’s it…you could play around and only move some of the folders and keep the plugins folder to then do updates on your existing plugins.

The steps in method 2 leaves the original start up links from the Ubuntu menu, taskbar, toolbar and any other pre-existing links.