When developing software I sometimes like to use Eclipse (I recently did some work involving Drools, and there is an excellent Eclipse workbench available for working with Drools). Instead of using a package manager (such as yum or apt) to install Eclipse, I prefer to use the release that is available from eclipse.org and install that in my home directory. That way I can install whatever plugins I want without risking issues when running updates in the package manager.
If you try to do this in Fedora you’ll quickly run into SElinux. This can easily be solved by specifying which java binary to use with Eclipse. You can do this by passing in -vm /path/to/java on the command line, or by adding this into the eclipse.ini file.
Another issue that you will have in both Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 is that certain UI buttons seem unresponsive. When clicking one of those buttons the UI is unresponsive for a few seconds, and when it wakes up it appears as if you had never clicked that button. This is due to the fact that both Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12 ship with a new version of GTK, which contains a new feature which certain applications such as Eclipse can’t handle properly. The fix to this is quite easy, you can deactivate this new feature by setting the environmental variable GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS to 1 (or true). You can do this by creating a script that does this before starting Eclipse, that way you don’t have to turn off this feature entirely but just for Eclipse.
The Fedora and Ubuntu versions of Eclipse that you can install via the distros’ package managers don’t have this problem, most likely because these versions of Eclipse turn off this GTK feature somehow (perhaps in the same way that I have described above).
You can read more about the GTK story here: http://blog.export.be/2009/10/fixing-eclipse-for-ubuntu-karmic-koala-9-10/. Kudos to the author, without that article it would have taken me a very long time to figure this one out 
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I also find the UI in Ubuntu 9.10 unresponsive; quite terrible:
1. Click on icons sometimes does not respond.
2. If you linger on a link or icon a floating icon appears that is difficult to dismiss and prevents action
3. The scrollbar sticks – once it this mode moving the mouse anywhere in the window causes scroll; for example – highlight this message and use copy – scrollbar becomes active. It appears that Ubuntu is trying to handle the iPhone gestures – If during the highlight operation scroll is necessary then it is likelly that scrolling becomes sticky.
4. Closing (probably related to 1), takes forever to recognise that cursor is on top of close. then takes many clicks tor action to complete.
5. Unresponsive. For example I highlight this message (speed Ok), with context menu chose Copy (slow), click on Applications (takes many clicks to open), from Accessories chose gedit (speed Ok), click on edit (slow or takes more than one try), paste (speeed Ok).
6. Return back to continuing this message (takes many tries).
7. Show window for gedit and click on File (slow), Save As (takes many tries)
Excuse the long rant. I will submit to ubuntu. -
Hi Fritz,
I have 9.10 running smoothly now, and I am very happy with it (I am not experiencing any of the problems that you are describing). In this post I was specifically talking about using Eclipse, I didn’t experience UI unresponsiveness in other applications.
I hope that the Ubuntu team and/or community can help you out with your problem.
Cheers,
Mark
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