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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T14:33:52+00:00

I have a dual-boot OS X / Ubuntu and am currently using separate Eclipse

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I have a dual-boot OS X / Ubuntu and am currently using separate Eclipse installations for each OS. The workspace is shared (on a common HFS+ partition), but I have to re-install all the plugins separately and the disk usage is not neglible as I’m on a SSD.

Is there any way to run the same Eclipse installation from both OSes? In my case, is it possible to run the OS X installation from Ubuntu? I’d also be interested in achieving the same thing with a Windows installation as a “host”.

So far, I tried merging the two installations into the same folder (without overwriting anything, just merging) and running it. Running the linux binary gets me to the initial splash screen, but then dies, complaining about missing some UI libaries. Changing the Eclipse.ini to point to the GTK folder. didn’t help. I also tried starting the JVM manually – with the Equinox launcher jar and specifying the Eclipse GTK UI relative path as an argument, but it died with some SWT exceptions.

I think there might be some complications, since in OS X the main binary isn’t located in the root eclipse folder but somewhere deeper in Eclipse.app/Mac/…

Also, is there any sense in doing so – would I be able to set different library paths etc., as Java, Python and other libraries aren’t installed in the same location of all OSes. I suppose, I could maybe overcome this by using symbolic links.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You should be able to do this as follows:

    1. Start with an Eclipse install for one of the platforms.
    2. Get the RCP delta pack (from the download site and look for “DeltaPack”).
    3. Put the contents of the eclipse/plugins folder into the “dropins” folder of your Eclipse installation. This will provide the necessary Jar files on all platforms, and it will also tell the p2 installer to install them correctly. You should also put it in your plugins folder so that your alternate version of eclipse.ini works correctly.
    4. Use the appropriate command line options to start with the desired architecture, OS and window system.

    You might need to have a version of eclipse.ini for each platform and specify the location of this using one of the command line args.

    Note that I have not tested this, but I’m hoping it will point you in the right direction.

    Another thing you can consider in more recent versions of Eclipse is that there might be some options with the p2 installer that allow all of the common plugins to be in a single place and then you can use the real installations (and instruct them to look in the common place for plugins). I don’t know how to do this, but you could look at the p2 documentation on the Eclipse wiki, or ask in the Eclipse p2 newsgroup or the p2-dev mailing list.

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