Eclipse refuses to start (AGAIN!)

Hi guys,

this story has a happy ending, after I tracked down the reason, I am not sure why this happens, but if someone knows, I would love to hear it.

I cloned a git repo to my computer, then opened a brand new eclipse workspace for the project, it opened a tiny grey blank window, eclipse would refuse to open.

I opened another project, it opened fine, no problems or hiccups, so then of course I tried to intersect the projects to find out what the differences was. I found the exact problem, although I am unable to find out why the problem occurs in the first place, since it was on the same machine I created the workspace which was ok and the workspace which was broken.

So perhaps eclipse in fedora has a bug, meh, I dont know, also, dont really care, cause I know how to fix it.

The problem was tracked down to a single file, it is:

.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.runtime/.settings/org.eclipse.ui.prefs

by default, my eclipse was not creating this file, but if you create it and then add the options

showIntro=false

eclipse will then start normally, as if nothing had happened, so something is going wrong with eclipse when this flag is not present and I have no idea why and nor google, cause I’ve tried hunting for specific information without any success.

So, if you ever, have this problem, create the missing file, put the missing parameter and try to see whether it starts or not. below are some screenshots to provide some visual record of what happened.