4.2.2.1.1. Installing the Eclipse IDE

It is recommended that you have the Juno 4.2 version of the Eclipse IDE installed on your development system. However, if you currently have the Indigo 3.7.2 version installed and you do not want to upgrade the IDE, you can configure Indigo to work with the Yocto Project. See the "Configuring the Eclipse IDE (Indigo)" section.

If you do not have the Juno 4.2 Eclipse IDE installed, you can find the tarball at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads. From that site, choose the Eclipse Classic version particular to your development host. This version contains the Eclipse Platform, the Java Development Tools (JDT), and the Plug-in Development Environment.

Once you have downloaded the tarball, extract it into a clean directory. For example, the following commands unpack and install the downloaded Eclipse IDE tarball into a clean directory using the default name eclipse:

     $ cd ~
     $ tar -xzvf ~/Downloads/eclipse-SDK-4.2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz
                    

If you have the Indigo 3.7.2 Eclipse IDE already installed and you want to use that version, one issue exists that you need to be aware of regarding the Java Virtual machine’s garbage collection (GC) process. The GC process does not clean up the permanent generation space (PermGen). This space stores metadata descriptions of classes. The default value is set too small and it could trigger an out-of-memory error such as the following:

     Java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space
                    

This error causes the application to hang.

To fix this issue, you can use the --vmargs option when you start the Indigo 3.7.2 Eclipse IDE to increase the size of the permanent generation space:

     eclipse --vmargs --XX:PermSize=256M