Source:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EclipseWebTools

http://flurdy.com/docs/eclipse/install.html

This is tutorial proved very helpful to me, that is why I am sharing it with all of you. There are few notes and comments that I added otherwise the whole tutorial is copied.

There are many ways to do this. This is only one method, but it works.

I cant take any credit for this set up, as I have mearly gathered information from my references.
As the old university excuse goes: Copy from one source is plagiarism, copy from two or more is research.

Ubuntu does come with many eclipse packages in the universal repositories. I dont use them as they rely on GCJ compiler, and not the genuine Sun one. Sun licenses is not compatible with Ubuntu's repositories and therefor have to seperatly downloaded. This howto creates a .deb packge from this download.

I have copied this to the Ubuntu Wiki. wiki.ubuntu.com/EclipseWebTools
The wiki is more up to date.

Download software

Download the latest JDK from Sun, currenly Tiger, 1.5.
Choose the latest jdk update, and then choose the self extracting non rpm file, eg. jdk-1_5_0_06-linux-i586.bin

Download the latest release of web tools from eclipse.
I use the full package of release 1. E.g. wtp-all-in-one-sdk-1.0.2-linux-gtk.tar.gz.
(Ps. its about 170Mb so might take awhile depending of bandwidth.)

Note: I have downloaded Eclipse Gynamede from here

Fetch the latest apache tomcat binary, currently 5.5.15.
Choose the core tar.gz file.

Install packages

First Sun's Java JDK:

Install fakeroot and java-package to be able to repackage the jdk as a .deb Make sure you have enabled the universe repositories.

sudo apt-get install fakeroot java-package

Once that is done we create the .deb jdk package.

fakeroot make-jpkg jdk-1_5_xxxx-linux-i586.bin

Some interaction is required, and there will be the odd permission error etc, but should be fine.

Then we install this new package

sudo dpkg -i sun-j2sdk1.5xxxx+updatexxx_i386.deb

Make Sun's Java your java...

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Choose the Sun JDK

Then Tomcat:

Untar download and copy to /opt

tar xzf apache-tomcat-5.5.15.tar.gz
sudo mv apache-tomcat-5.5.15 /opt/
cd /opt
sudo chown -R root:root apache-tomcat-5.5.15
sudo chmod -R +r apache-tomcat-5.5.15
sudo chmod +x `sudo find apache-tomcat-5.5.15 -type d`
sudo ln -s apache-tomcat-5.5.15 tomcat

Edit tomcat users

sudoedit /opt/tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml

And add an admin and your own?

<user name="admin" password="admin" roles="manager,admin" />
<user name="yourname" password="blah" roles="manager,admin" />

Then Eclipse:

Extract the eclipse download and move to opt.

Note: This is what I did after downloading the Eclipse Gynamde IDE. Extract it and copy it to a proper place e.g; /home/my_user_name/software, change the ownership and chmod. For that I did the following


tar xzf eclipse-jee-ganymede-SR1-linux-gtk.tar.gz
sudo mv eclipse /home/user_name/eclipse3.4


then cd to /home/user_name/eclipse3.4 and provide the following command

sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
sudo chmod -R +r eclipse


This is whats done in the original tutorial.

tar xzf wtp-all-in-one-sdk-1.0-linux-gtk.tar.gz
sudo mv eclipse /opt/eclipse cd /opt sudo chown -R root:root eclipse
sudo chmod -R +r eclipse
sudo chmod +x `sudo find eclipse -type d`

Then create an eclipse executable in your path

Note: An easy way to do the following is to create a file with name 'eclipse' in /usr/bin and provide following commands

sudo touch /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse

then provide the code to set environment variables as mentioned.

This is what is done in the original tutorial

sudo touch /usr/bin/eclipse
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/eclipse
sudoedit /usr/bin/eclipse

With this contents

#!/bin/sh
#export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME="/usr/lib/mozilla/"
export ECLIPSE_HOME="/opt/eclipse"

$ECLIPSE_HOME/eclipse $*

Then create a gnome menu item

sudoedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse.desktop

With this contents

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Eclipse
Comment=Eclipse IDE
Exec=eclipse
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
StartupNotify=true

Configure

You now have a working eclipse. But run this command first to initialise the set up.

/opt/eclipse/eclipse -clean

Then from here on you can run from the menu item applications/programming/eclipse

Add Projects

Follow this tutorial to create web projects and to add tomcat as the server for this project

Or

follow my own alternative way of creating projects compatible with Eclipse.