Hi,

Someone asked how I got native eclipse running on my Debian box and how
to get the JDT (Java Development Tools) and api documentation/code
completion tooltips work out of the box.

The following only explains how to get the needed binaries installed.
For compiling from source you will need a lot more dependencies and I
have only tried compiling from source on a Red Hat system.

You need to make sure that you have a recent Debian unstable
installation (you need glibc-2.3.x).

Then get the following RPMs:
(Is there a more recent snapshot?)
http://people.redhat.com/~jhealy/eclipse/snapshot-20030802-eclipse-2.1.0-12.i386.rpm
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/taroon/en/as/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libgcc-ssa-3.5ssa-0.20030801.34.i386.rpm
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/taroon/en/as/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libgcj-ssa-3.5ssa-0.20030801.34.i386.rpm

http://people.redhat.com/~jhealy/eclipse/ lists:
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/taroon/en/ws/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libgcj-ssa-3.5ssa-0.20030617.24.i386.rpm
http://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/taroon/en/ws/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libgcc-ssa-3.5ssa-0.20030617.24.i386.rpm
Which don't seem to exist anymore.

Run 'alien' to turn these into:
libgcc-ssa_3.5ssa-1.20030801_i386.deb
libgcj-ssa_3.5ssa-1.20030801_i386.deb
eclipse_2.1.0-13_i386.deb

And install these with dpkg --install

To make the JDT work out of the box you will need to make your
/usr/bin/java binary the following script:

#!/bin/sh
gij-ssa -Dsun.boot.class.path=/usr/share/java/libgcj-3.5-tree-ssa.jar $*

(Note that /usr/bin/java is handled by the alternative system in Debian
so make sure that you know what you are doing when overriding it.)

Then (optionally) if you happen to have to sources of libgcj
(gcc/libjava) available (or GNU Classpath) create a src.zip file with:
$ fastjar cf src.zip gnu java javax org
Copy this src.zip to the root directory (yes, /).

That way you get automatic API tooltip documentation while typing your
program as can be seen at:
http://www.klomp.org/mark/gij_eclipse/code_completion.png
(Actually that is from an older version of gcj, when eclipse only ran
with gij, but the idea is the same.)

Cheers,

Mark