Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Wooot! The problem was entirely in the mount options in my fstab. For some inexplicable reason I had “defaults,users” even though there is no desire that users have the ability to mount and unmount /home! That caused some ripples, and I couldn’t run bash scripts normally, and mmap failed on objects in the /home partition. It was ugly, and confusing. When I changed the /etc/fstab, to use “defaults” instead and remounted, all problems vanished. Live is good, eclipse works, bash works. All is well. I bet that error is unique to me.

I can’t run Eclipse. I’m not sure how this happened, but it was in the course of redoing partitions, oddly enough.
I got rid of my windows partition, and moved /home there in order to get about double the space for my files, then I got rid of my /data by moving it to the much larger part where /home used to live. I also made a single swap part (oddly enough there were two).

As a result, it seems that hibernate doesn’t work (a Linux problem I don’t yet know how to fix) so I just use the suspend, and also eclipse wont load. Every other app works just fine. I install eclipse via APT tools using XUbuntu’s repositories.

As a brute-force remediation, I marked all the eclipse tools for reinstall, and nothing got better. I was frustrated.

I figured that a fresh install of eclipse would probably install correctly, so I need my system to be free. I removed all the packages for eclipse via the APT system. Then I found all vestiges of eclipse and wiped them out, including /usr/{share,lib,bin}/eclipse* and ~/.eclipse stuff. I made sure it was gone. As far as I could tell, there was no sign that eclipse had ever been on my machine. Now for that fresh install — I went to apt and had it install eclipse. Strangely enough, i didn’t get a startup.jar and it looks like other things were missing. I removed, cleaned, autocleaned, and reinstalled a few times and then I got my startup. Looks like some part of the solver was confused about what I had and didn’t have. I don’t know why.

I now have a different set of error messages. They start like this:

!SESSION 2007-01-23 20:28:57.180 ———————————————–
eclipse.buildId=M20060921-0945
java.version=1.5.0_08
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=linux, ARCH=x86, WS=gtk, NL=en_US
Framework arguments: –initialize
Command-line arguments: -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86 –initialize

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: initializer_error in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: fileInitializer_fileNotFound in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: fileInitializer_IOError in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 1 2007-01-23 20:29:00.346
!MESSAGE NLS missing message: fileInitializer_missingFileName in: org.eclipse.core.internal.runtime.messages

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2007-01-23 20:29:00.374
!MESSAGE An error occurred while automatically activating bundle org.eclipse.ui.workbench (103).
!STACK 0
org.osgi.framework.BundleException: The activator org.eclipse.ui.internal.WorkbenchPlugin for bundle org.eclipse.ui.workbench is invalid
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.loadBundleActivator(AbstractBundle.java:141)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleContextImpl.start(BundleContextImpl.java:962)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleHost.startWorker(BundleHost.java:317)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.start(AbstractBundle.java:256)
at org.eclipse.core.runtime.internal.adaptor.EclipseLazyStarter.preFindLocalClass(EclipseLazyStarter.java:86)
at org.eclipse.osgi.baseadaptor.loader.ClasspathManager.findLocalClass(ClasspathManager.java:409)
at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.findLocalClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:188)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findLocalClass(BundleLoader.java:334)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.SingleSourcePackage.loadClass(SingleSourcePackage.java:37)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:383)
at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.BundleLoader.findClass(BundleLoader.java:347)
at org.eclipse.osgi.internal.baseadaptor.DefaultClassLoader.loadClass(DefaultClassLoader.java:83)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:319)
(yadda yadda yadda)

The stack trace goes on and on. Since I’m not really a java developer (yet) and not familiar with eclipse internals or structure (I’ve only used it as a pedestrian noob) I have no idea what it’s looking for. All I know is that it does not work. I suppose I’ll be back to long google searches and the wild goose chases that entails. It would help if I knew what I was doing with eclipse, but it will be more magic incantations (try this… does that work? No? Oh, then undo it and try *this*).

It seems that one of the worst features of java apps is their extreme sensitivity to setup issues and their inability to help resolve them. I was a happy eclipse user one day, the next day eclipse and hibernate don’t work, but all of the other apps on my system are completely happy and sane. I lost nothing but Eclipse, but I really need that to work now.

I guess that Java is a little slice of hell, and to work there you have to learn a lot of things you don’t want to know.