newly-installed eclipse fails to start

[Amedee Van Gasse]

On Mon, June 13, 2011 17:43, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
>   i'm sure i've done something silly but on my fully-updated ubuntu
> 10.10 system, i installed eclipse (having had it on this system a
> while back), so this is my current situation:

Eclipse is one of the very few applications where I don't trust Ubuntu's
package manglement. There used to be a time when Ubuntu was a few versions
behind, and there wasn't a stable PPA for the latest Eclipse.

I just download it from eclipse.org and extract the archive to a folder in
my home directory.