Getting older versions of eclipse on karmic seems to require a few additional steps. While 3.5.1 (Galileo) is packaged with karmic, there are some quirks in the UT interaction which makes it difficult to use. In addition, I needed 3.4.2 (Ganymede) for rssOwl – an eclipse based rss reader I was trying to figure the code out for.
Downloaded the tar.gz from the eclipse site directly, and gave it a go after unpacking. While the splash screen came up and there was some activity in loading the workbench, etc, the IDE hung with a blank dialog box. The logs under workspace/.metadata/.log complained:
!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui.workbench 4 0 2009-10-10 18:44:28.933
!MESSAGE Widget disposed too early!
!STACK 0
java.lang.RuntimeException: Widget disposed too early!
at org.eclipse.ui.internal.WorkbenchPartReference$1.
widgetDisposed(WorkbenchPartReference.java:171)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TypedListener.handleEvent(TypedListener.java:117)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(EventTable.java:84)
at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Widget.java:1158)
-startup
Seems to be a bug with xulrunner. While the version that fixes the issue (xulrunner) is available on karmic, the downloaded installation does not point to it.
To get this working, just add the following to eclipse.ini on a separate line:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner
Where /usr/lib/xulrunner is the location of version 1.9
This forum thread discusses the issue in more detail.

6 Comments
Excellent finding.
This saved my day.
thanks man, that helped alot
Fantastic! Thank you. Salesforce.com requires version 3.4 or below, which makes it hard to develop on Ubuntu without this fix.
A great relief…..thank you very much
the fix realy works. Thank you
Great! Your article helped me get Eclipse running. THANKS!
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