Stick with the masses ( Eclipse 3.4.1 XPCOM error -2147467262 )

There is a lot to be said about sticking with the masses, going with the crowd so to speak. Especially when you are riding the crowd (crowd) surfing for a different purpose .. huh ?

Let me explain ..

I have been an active user of Linux for the best part of 14 years. In that time, I have sat on the bleeding edge of changes and sometimes suffered. But, also I had time to kill, the fix and fix and patch time was kind of fun.

These days I have a lot less time that I allocate to that discretionary IT time budget, as I have a 2 girls and my beautiful wife with whom I enjoy spending time.

I still mass large amounts of work into my time, but when something goes wrong, ancillary to my task, (or, better put - my tools fail), then i get cranky.

Just on Friday I was prepping to make some changes to camel-file/ftp, adding support for commons-vfs and my eclipse failed to load.

It worked on the Thu, but Fri, nothing. My error said look at workspace/.metadata/.log

In there I find an obscure message...

!ENTRY org.eclipse.ui 4 0 2009-01-12 14:23:58.273
!MESSAGE Unhandled event loop exception
!STACK 0
org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Failed to execute runnable (org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467262)

As it turned out, this was caused by an incompatibility with my eclipse and (possible Firefox or something in a mozilla stack).

What was my fix ? Well it turns out, the workspace info page at the first startup of eclipse uses a browser (no worries). But it had fundametal issues launching my system default browser. To get past the bug .. you need to unpack a jar

(/opt/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.ui.intro_3.2.201.v20080702_34x.jar)

and edit the plugin.xml, commenting out all extension elements, repack it and restart eclipse with a -clean.

See here for details (this link was the 5th attempt at me getting around the problem).

So why stick with the masses ? Well, I can only guess, but I suspect my running of Ubuntu amd64 is the cause of this eclipse issue biting me. Or, put it mildly, the error has not been tested much on this platform and I got stung, I could be wrong, but I can only guess that, surely others have seen the problem, I am not the only one running eclipse on Linux.

Where it failed for me is that Ubuntu automatically updated (something) and then my eclipse broke. I haven't got the time to work out what updated in the last week due to the auto update manager .. ? question: is there such a place to see the install log.. dpkg must know).

Anyways, my problem is gone and I am back to my usual eclipse-ing self. (minus the intro page, but i have never used that anyway).