phenorbitalBlog of a graduate working in banking IT in London.

Eclipse on the EeeFiled Under: Coding

So, it seems that something (I’m not sure what, I haven’t really investigated at the moment) has broken with my desktop as it now refuses to boot. Fortunately I have my Eee, which I already know works perfectly fine for things like web and IM. This left me wondering; how useful would it be for development.

So, as I’ve recently done a bit more work on Choob I decided to have a look at getting a development environment for this, using Eclipse, set up. This wasn’t exactly easy, given the limited set of packages available by default for the version of Xandros on the Eee, but I’d already worked around this following some instructions on the internet elsewhere - enabling me to install subversion.

The next challenge was finding enough space to install both Eclipse and the JDK in, as preferably these would both want to be on the local machine rather than any additional storage. In the end I opted to (rather than uninstall something like Open Office) move some of the contents of /usr/share (for things I rarely use) onto my SD card and just link to them. Hack-tastic.

So, I was set, all that remained was to use Eclipse. As the Eee is quite low-specced, I had anticipated plentiful performance problems, however I was pleasantly surprised. Start up time is a couple of minutes, which is quite standard, and once going it runs quite well. Occasionally some actions (usually where a amount of building is required) will take a while, but on the whole it’s perfectly usable - provided I’ve got the external monitor and keyboard plugged in. I’ve yet to try it on the Eee’s standard setup, but I suspect it’s not particularly great, although I’m sure I’ll end up doing this at some point soon.

Tags: eclipse, eee