Installing Eclipse (4.4) Luna on Xubuntu 14.04

Xubuntu 14.04 (Ubuntu) still provides Eclipse 3.8 on its repositories. To install the latest release of Eclipse (4.4), the package must be downloaded from Eclipse's website, and extracted manually.

The package can be downloaded here:

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Once the package is downloaded, it should be manually extracted. I extracted the package at my home directory.

tar -xvf ~/Downloads/eclipse-standard-luna-R-linux-gtk_64.tar.gz

The package will be extracted as eclipse directory. To keep locally installed packages organized I moved it to /usr/local/eclipse-luna/. I still have Eclipse Kepler in /usr/local/ hence the different directory.

sudo mv eclipse /usr/local/eclipse-luna

A symbolic link to eclipse executable is then made at /usr/local/bin/.

sudo ln -s /usr/local/eclipse-luna/eclipse /usr/local/bin/eclipse-luna

To make the application appear on the Whisker Menu, a file eclipse-luna.desktop should be created in directory /usr/share/applications/ with the following contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Eclipse Luna
Comment=IDE
Exec=eclipse-luna
Icon=/usr/local/eclipse-luna/icon.xpm
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Development;

After saving, it should appear on the Whisker Menu similar to this: