Problem Installing Eclipse on Ubuntu - eclipse

Question

I downloaded the Eclipse IDE for Java Developers Linux 32 Bit file from here.
I extracted the file and launched eclipse from the command line.
Instead of Eclipse starting I get this message in a dialog box:
VM terminated. Exit code=13
/usr/bin/java
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx384m
-jar /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
-os linux
-ws gtk
-arch x86
-showsplash
-launcher /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/eclipse
-name Eclipse
--launcher.library /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_1.1.1.R36x_v20100810/eclipse_1309.so
-startup /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
-exitdata 420021
-product org.eclipse.epp.package.java.product
-vm /usr/bin/java
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-Xms40m
-Xmx384m
-jar /home/justme/Desktop/FIREFOX_DOWNLOADS/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.0.v20100507.jar
Any ideas how to fix this? I'm on Ubuntu 8.10 64bit and here's my Java info:
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_0"
IcedTea6 1.3.1 (6b12-0ubuntu6.7) Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_0-b12)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_0-b12, mixed mode)

Answer 1

First thing is to ensure you're running the java you think you're running. You can tell from your error output that it's using /usr/bin/java so run
/usr/bin/java -version
to check the version. That java is not necessarily the one on your path - you can find out which one that is with:
which java
Second thing you should probably try is the 64bit version of Eclipse. Everything else you have is 64bit.
Beyond that, I had all sorts of trouble early on with non-Sun JREs. That may not be the case now (or it may have been only specific to me) but it's something else you may want to look at.
On top of that (and probably unrelated to the problem at hand), do you really want to be running Eclipse from within your Firefox download directory. I would move it somewhere else personally.