27 May 2011
How to fix Eclipse Helios crashes on Fedora 15
Fedora 15 was released on tuesday 24.5.2011 and it contains the new flashy Gnome 3 desktop and loads of other new stuff. As usual, the new Fedora distribution contains also new versions of the system libraries, including version 2 of the XULRunner. Unfortunately the unmodified Eclipse Helios only support versions 1.8.x - 1.9.2.x of XULRunner and doesn't play nice with version 2.
Eclipse starts ok and most of the features work without problems, but the content-assist is something that crashes the program every time. You don't actually need to press Ctrl+Space to init the crash, hovering the mouse cursor over a variable in the source code is enough.
Fortunately the crashing can be avoided by doing two things:
- In Gnome3 the webkit library name changed to libwebkitgtk so you need to create one missing symbolic link: ln -s /usr/lib/libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 /usr/lib/libwebkit-1.0.so.2
- Add -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.UseWebKitGTK=true to eclipse.ini
After doing these two things, the content-assist and the internal browser work once again and they won't crash the whole development environment.