ProteinSpill.com

Eclipse on Mac OS X (Intel)

May 24, 2006 on 7:15 pm | In General Nonsense | 4 Comments

What a pain this was. For those of you who don’t know, Eclipse is an integrated development environment written in Java. Java is supposed to be “write once, run anywhere.” Not exactly the case here, and not clear if you try to download it for your shiny new Intel Macintosh.

I downloaded the latest stable release, 3.12 and installed it on my MacBook. When I went to run it, it throws up the splash screen and looks like it’s going to run and then a simple messagebox with a message to look in ~/Documents/workspace/.metalog/.log for details.

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
/Applications/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/
bundles/63/1/.cp/libswt-pi-carbon-3139.jnilib:
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1586)

There’s actually a lot more to it than that, but that’s all the details I had to go on. I’m not exactly familiar with Java so I don’t know how to decipher this. I decided to try jEdit instead. Nice editor, but I’m using Eclipse at work.

I searched Google for days using keywords like “eclipse mac” or “eclipse error jini” or “eclipse error install” which didn’t turn up anything useful. It was beginning to look like I was the only one to get this error. Today I searched for “eclipse unsatisfiedlinkerror” duh! I got a link to Steph’s blog which pointed out another stupid assumption. I’m not going to take the entire blame here though—remember, Java isn’t supposed to be platform-specific.

It turns out that there is a newer (unstable?) release of Eclipse that supports the Intel Macs. I’m in the process of downloading it now.

It works!