Jeff Mesnil
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Eclipse 3.2 and Welcome page on Ubuntu

July 3, 2006

Eclipse 3.2 is out and it is a great release. :-)

However, the default Welcome page I had on my Ubuntu desktop is quite broken

Broken Welcome Page in Eclipse 3.2

  • it is ugly
  • the links to the workbench are broken (links like http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showPage?id=overview open in Firefox)
  • when I close it, it asks me to save a file

After a little search on eclipe.org SWT FAQ, it appears that by default, Ubuntu is missing the MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME which is required by SWT to use the web browser internally.

I just added this variable before starting Eclipse:

export MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME=/usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/

and the Welcome page appeared as expected:

Welcome Page in Eclipse 3.2

I really like the new theme (Circles) by the way. )