2010 Aug 18 - Wed

Cygwin, Eclipse and Subversion Installation Notes

I have written several articles about Eclipse (the code editing UI) and it's integration with subversion. This is an update of a few things to watch out for with Eclipse, the Helios release. I do development on Linux as well as on Windows. In this case my primary machine is a Windows machine running VMWare with several guest Linux systems.

For the Linux systems with a GUI, I've used Cygwin to provide a mechanism of running the Linux interfaces on my Windows interface. I have tried the VMWare Unity mechanism, but on my multi-monitor system, it appears clunky and buggy.

When installing Cygwin, the key library to install is the 'xinit' library. This loads all other necessary X11 libraries. Also include mintty in the Shells category for an improved console experience.

As a side note for regular terminal operations in Cygwin, the following can be used with mintty. Start 'ssh-agent mintty'. mintty is explained at http://code.google.com/p/mintty/. Then use ssh-add to add a private key. The public key can be added to the ~/.ssh/authorized_key files on the destination machines.

Anyway, for getting the GUI experience, use startxwin to start an xwindow terminal window. Connect to the destination computer with 'ssh -l username -Y ipaddress'. At that point, I run eclipse with '/usr/sbin/eclip[se/eclipse &'. The '&' forks the process and allows further operations in the terminal window.

I've got ahead of myself here. To get eclipse installed, I downloaded the binaries from eclipse.org, expanded them to a directory called eclipse. I then moved the directory to /usr/sbin. Eclipse can then be started with '/usr/sbin/eclipse/eclipse'.

For version control, the Polaris subversion client is listed as a standard item in the Collaboration items in the Eclipse New Software. After trying that, I wasn't very pleased with the experience. It is not well integrated.

Instead, I removed the Polaris Subversive client and installed the Tigris.org Subclipose Client. The integration into Eclipse is much better. I used the SVNKit (Pure Java) connector so as to obtain the svn+ssh://... tunnelling capability with a private key based login.