Eclipse on the Hardy Heron (Ubuntu)

I took a bit of time with all the unpacking to getting my laptop up and running again. It seemed that the swap partition died, so I reinstalled everything. Well, at least I reinstalled Ubuntu, reinstalling Windows looks difficult. The first thing that I did after I reinstalled Ubuntu was run the Update Manager, which gave the option of upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Well, if it is that easy, go for it. So I now have Hardy Heron on my laptop.

So for the past week, I've been upgrading packages, and figuring out what I need to get my system up. Most of it is pretty easy, just use the Ubuntu Synaptic Package manager and a few judicious searches get everything. And I got a few extras like Picasa and Google Earth. Evolution is now setup to use my Gmail and Google Calendar accounts. So almost all is good.

The big hiccup was getting Eclipse running. It was in the Ubuntu repositories, so I tried to load it from there. Problem, Ubuntu had Eclipse 3.2. The current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the way. And the jump from 3.2 to 3.3 was big enough that some major applications that run in Eclipse require it. So I had to remove Eclipse 3.2 using the package manager, and install Eclipse from the website, just like I do with Windows. Annoying.

So, what do I have on Eclipse. Pydev is a must, as Python is my standard development language. Texlipse for LaTeX. Subclipse to use Subversion for source code. And StatET, for using with R (I've never used StatET before). And there are a couple other gotchas when installing Eclipse (like the need to have a directory $HOME/.mozilla/eclipse existing) that I would not have been able to figure out without some judicious web surfing). But just about everything is there now. I may not bother installing the Windows, but I may as well.