How to Install Eclipse Oxygen IDE in CentOS, RHEL and Fedora

In this tutorial we’ll cover the installation process of the latest edition of Eclipse Oxygen IDE in CentOS, Red Hat and Fedora based Linux distributions.

Eclipse is a free integrated development environment IDE used by programmers world-wide to write and develop Java applications mostly. However, Eclipse IDE can support a large variety of compilers and programming languages via installed plugins that extend its functionality.

The latest release of Eclipse Oxygen IDE doesn’t come with pre-build binary packages specific for RHEL or CentOS based Linux distributions. Instead, you can install Eclipse IDE in CentOS, Fedora or other Red Hat Linux based distributions via tarball archive files.

Requirements:

1. A Desktop machine with minimum 2GB of RAM.
2. Java 9 SE SDK installed in Red Hat Linux based distributions.

Install Eclipse Oxygen IDE in CentOS, RHEL and Fedora

On the first step, open a browser, navigate to Eclipse official download page and download the latest version of the tar package specific for your installed Linux distribution architecture.

Alternatively, you can also download Eclipse IDE tarball file in your system via wget utility, by issuing the below command.

-------------- For 64-bit Architecture -------------- 
$ wget http://ftp.fau.de/eclipse/technology/epp/downloads/release/oxygen/2/eclipse-jee-oxygen-2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz 
-------------- For 32-bit Architecture --------------
$ wget http://ftp.fau.de/eclipse/technology/epp/downloads/release/oxygen/2/eclipse-jee-oxygen-2-linux-gtk.tar.gz

After the download completes, navigate to the directory where the archive package has been downloaded and issue the below commands to start installing Eclipse Oxygen IDE.

The commands executed below will install Eclipse IDE directly into /opt directory. Afterwards, create a symlink into /usr/local/bin/ directory for Eclipse IDE executable file and verify symbolic link path via ls command.

$ sudo tar xfz eclipse-jee-oxygen-2-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz -C /opt/
$ ls /opt/eclipse/
$ sudo ln -s /opt/eclipse/eclipse /usr/local/bin/eclipse
$ ls -al /usr/local/bin/eclipse 

Next, create Eclipse desktop launcher into system applications directory.

$ sudo nano /usr/share/applications/eclipse-oxygen.desktop

Add the following configuration into the file eclipse-oxygen.desktop.

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Eclipse Oxygen
Comment=Eclipse Oxygen IDE
Type=Application
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=/usr/local/bin/eclipse
Icon=/opt/eclipse/icon.xpm
Categories=GNOME;Application;Development;
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true

After you’ve created Eclipse launcher, use Gnome dash to search and open the application. On the first application launch, add Eclipse workspace directory and hit on Launch button to start the application.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully installed the latest version of Eclipse IDE in your Red Hat Linux based system.