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Getting Eclipse to start without incompatibility errors on Linux Mint 19.1

Published on 12th June 2019 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Recent curiosity about Java programming and Groovy scripting got me trying to start up the Eclipse IDE that I had installed on my main machine. What I got instead of a successful application startup was a message that included the following:

!MESSAGE Exception launching the Eclipse Platform:
!STACK
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.eclipse.core.runtime.adaptor.EclipseStarter
at java.base/java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:466)
at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:566)
at java.base/java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:499)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.invokeFramework(Main.java:626)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.basicRun(Main.java:584)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.run(Main.java:1438)
at org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:1414)

The cause was a mismatch between Eclipse and the installed version of Java that it needed to run. After all, the software itself is written in the Java language and the installed version from the usual software repositories was too old for Java 11. The solution turned out to be installing a newer version as a Snap (Ubuntu's answer to Flatpak). The following command did the needful since snapd already was running on my machine:

sudo snap install eclipse --classic

The only part of the command that warrants extra comment is the --classic switch, since that is needed for a tool like Eclipse that needs to access a host file system. On executing, the software was downloaded from Snapcraft and then installed within its own bundle of dependencies. The latter adds a certain detachment from the underlying Linux installation and ensures that no messages appear because of incompatibilities like the one near the start of this post.

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