I have Eclipse + PyDev installed on my laptop and desktop, both of which are dual-boot Windows Vista 64 & Ubuntu 12.04. Right now the only 'version' I have fully fleshed out pretty much the way I want it is in Windows on the laptop. What would be the best way to duplicate (and hopefully synchronize) this across both computers and both operating systems? In this case the only one using the account(s) would be myself.
A few suggestions:
If you just want to refine your Eclipse installations with some
common configuration then allow them deviating from that point, you
could copy your workspace folder to all places you want, then switch
to those workspaces from within Eclipse. You can also export your preferences from
within Eclipse using File > Export > General > Preferences, that may work as well,
or better.
If you want to share Eclipse configuration between Ubuntu and Windows, you could install NTFS-3G in Ubuntu, then make Eclipse workspace point to your Windows partition. I'm not sure if Eclipse can deal with this well though (for example JDK path).
If you want to use same configuration for all of your devices and operating systems, and considering you won't be using more than one Eclipse instance at same time:
If you have wi-fi, you could share your Eclipse workspace in Windows then map a network drive letter in the other Windows, and mount a remote network location in your Ubuntus. You could still use second suggestion above for same device.
Alternatively, you could use rsync or similar to synchronize your different workspaces, both when you start and close Eclipse. This way, you move possible performance issues with above option from when you are using Eclipse to when you are starting or closing it.
You sync on start for getting up-to-date with latest changes from other devices, and on close because you want to push the changes you have made to other workspaces as well. In Ubuntu, you could just wrap the sync commands around Eclipse call in a shell script, and in Windows you can do the same with Hidden Start, except that it can hide shell window for you.
You could use services such as Dropbox, Skydrive or Ubuntu One to store your Eclipse workspace and let their client software do the synchronization job for you.
This is what came up to my mind. Maybe Eclipse has something built-in to deal with this other than export wizard, not sure.
What exactly to share
Remember that the workspace is where all your personal configurations reside, including the list of projects you see when using Eclipse. If some of these projects are outside workspace directory you may face path conflicts, for example C:\MyProject present in your PC but missing in laptop. You could keep all your projects within workspace directory for avoiding this though. Also, if you go for the first suggestion, export wizard as said may work better.
I don't think it's a good idea to share only part of workspace, unless you know what you are doing, and I don't see much benefit from sharing whole Eclipse directory itself (which is not possible between Linux and Windows anyway). You can find out where exactly your workspace is located in File > Switch Workspace.
Related
I have an Eclipse PyDev project (Eclipse 4.7.3a). I want to be able to sync the Eclipse workspace between several computers (and that it works, obviously).
First problem : the Python virtual environment. I have installed it in a folder that is located next to the Eclipse workspace (but not inside it) and is also synced between the various computers.
Since the folders for the workspace and the Python virtualenv are not located at the same point the of file system (I use Linux), my guess the simplest way to achieve this would be to use some kind of environment variable, different on each computer, that would point to the directory that contains all the synced folders.
So how can I set a Python virtualenv using a kind of system environment variable ?
Or is there another way to achieve my goal (sharing and syncing an Eclipse workspace between several computers) ?
This is not currently possible.
The workspace has information which is dependent on the absolute paths and is not really shareable (unless you have a mirror in both computers with files in the same paths on both).
Some configurations can be saved in the project itself or in the user settings (the ones that can do that have buttons in the preferences page to save to a project / show from a project -- but note that the interpreter itself still doesn't have that).
Personally, what I do is save everything possible in the project and commit that to git (so, anyone using the project will use those same settings), and try to use the same paths on multiple machines.
I downloaded and ran eclipse.exe.exe for installation, but it doesn't get added to the Programs as an Installed software. I always get to locate the .exe and launch the IDE from there. Any thoughts why it doesn't get installed as a Program?
Eclipse doesn't work as a regular installation, but as an archive of related files, majorly because to create as much as a loose connection to the environment/OS as possible. Applications that are installed need to update data in OS registry and is therefore on some points restricted. In your Eclipse IDE you can specify own registries with data relevant for the project.
Another benefit is that it's easily updated and can also be easily shared between work stations without installation. That gives flexibility, if your workspace is corrupted, you don't need to uninstall, reinstall, restart and all that stuff. All you need is to take a back up of your plugins folder inside you Eclipse, and then discard the current directory, unzip the original download and replace your plugins with the backup. You are up and running on a new instance, no holds barred !!
I am an Eclipse newbie (on Windows 7). Is it possible to have two Eclipse installations at the same time where one is customized for Python development (via PyDev), and the other for embedded C development (through GNU toolchains)? If so, how would one go about doing this? If one of the Eclipse environments is already installed, what should I pay attention to when installing the second environment? (Or is there another, completely different approach that only uses one copy of Eclipse, but multiple plug-ins? Just thinking out loud here.)
I am apprehensive of things (plugins, workspaces, environment variables, etc.) getting mixed up.
Just install the second Eclipse in a separate directory and use separate workspaces and there should not be any problem. Eclipse keeps all the configuration information about the installation in its install directory. All information about a workspace is kept in the workspace.
Get the zip-version of eclipse, unzip it into two different folders, and create a separate workspace for each of them. Then install plug ins etc.. This works on Linux; I don't see why it shouldn't work on Windows.
Setting up Eclipse on each machine I work it a real headache and I want to keep the Eclipse files and configuration in-sync between several machines.
I want to keep Eclipse in sync on OS X, Linux and Windows so I started getting the OS X version of eclipse because it has the app needed for OS X, as for the other two platforms it's easier to launch it.
What questions/problems I have:
What should I not sync?
Where can I put JDBC jar files so they are synced too? Is there a way to load them using a relative path?
Any success stories?
Note: this is not about getting the projects themselves in sync, for this there are all blends of SCM.
You can not share the Eclipse installation directory or the workspace, but the projects themselves are easy to keep in sync using a version management system like cvs, svn, git, etc. I suppose you could store your project contents in a Dropbox folder (or similar file system syncing mechanism) and then just force Refresh when you sit down at a machine that was using those projects, but I've never tried it and would be wary that human error could lead to lost work or corruption of files.
The key is that, although workspaces themselves can't be shared, projects don't have to be located physically under the workspace folder on your file system. That's because the workspace is a logical container for projects, not necessarily a physical container. When creating a project you can specify an arbitrary file system location for the project contents. The default just happens to be under the workspace location. SO on each machine you'd have a separate workspace that imported the project(s) from wherever you are syncing them on your file system. That way the workspace is a tiny container that doesn't require much ongoing maintenance on each machine. I do this locally all the time - I have multiple workspaces on my machine, some of which include the same projects as others.
Most of the configuration of Eclipse is in the Workspace. And unfortunately, all the files in it are platform specific. I've tried doing something like this myself and had no luck. Asking questions in their IRC channel didn't leave me with hope either.
I have couple of different OSs installed. When I try to start eclipse in another OS eclipse starts complaining about workspace being used by 'another eclipse instance'. In case you don't know eclipse uses .lock files for that.
How to fix this?
I see a couple of possible ways to deal with this problem:
Disable .lock file check (It can cause some problems if opening workspace in 2 eclipses at the same time)
To make an empty 'workspace' just to make eclipse happy about all that settings and .metadata and .locks and keep projects elsewhere.
Removing .lock file every time I boot another OS. But what if I'll make a new workspace?
Is there a standard (or just better) solution of this problem?
If you exited Eclipse cleanly, then it should not complain about the Workspace being used.
Or do you want to access a Workspace with multiple Eclipses simultaneously?
UPDATE: Anyway I did this on a Mac, using the same Workspace on a FAT32 partition from OSX, Ubuntu and Windows, and I didn't encounter many problems. Of course remember to set the file encoding and line termination setting project or Workspace wide!
Eclipse workspaces are not designed or intended to be shared across different machines (nor across different operating systems). Trying to do so is certain to cause headaches and possibly even corruption of the workspace. There are things like absolute file paths (and other artifacts) embedded into workspaces that simply are not portable.
The better approach is to locate the projects elsewhere in the file system outside of the workspace; that way you can have multiple workspaces "contain" the project(s). Creating such a project is easy from the project creation wizards (a checkbox labeled like "Use default location" that needs to be un-checked, and an accompanying field that is filled in with the desired files system location). From another workspace, use File > Import > Existing Project Into Workspace to get the project in.