Install Aptana as plugin in Eclipse¶

Download the Eclipse classic SDK latest version from http://eclipse.org

untar Eclipse:

cd ~/Desktop
mv eclipse-SDK-3.4.1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz ~/src
cd ~/src
tar -xzvf eclipse-SDK-3.4.1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz
cd eclipse
sudo ln -s ~/src/eclipse/eclipse /usr/local/bin/eclipse

Then install Java:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

This will install the required packages, however, Eclipse will run very slowly since it will be using GNU's java, not Sun's (or optionally openjdk). To make Sun's java the default on the system, use the update-java-alternatives command:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

Next, edit the JVM configuration file

sudo -b gedit /etc/jvm

and add the following to the top of the file

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

There is a bug right now were Eclipse ignores Ubuntu's java-common settings and uses its own (bug 45347). To work around the bug, you need to edit Eclipse's java_home file

sudo -b gedit ~/src/eclipse/java_home

and add

/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

to the top of the file.

Lastly, if you have lots of memory you may want to increase the heap size (warning: If you make the heap size too large then parts of eclipse will continuously swap in and out.).
The settings can be altered by editing the eclipse.ini file.

sudo -b gedit ~/src/eclipse/eclipse.ini

Make the last five lines look somthing like this (assuming you want to allocate 720 MB of RAM max to eclipse and minimum 256 MB of RAM

--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
720m
-vmargs
-Xms256m
-Xmx720m

The argument Xms refers to the minimum heap size and Xmx refers to the maximum heap size.
For more on tuning the Eclipse JVM heap size, you can refer to this IBM article.

Then to install Aptana follow the instructions for Aptana plugin install