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1

Today I restarted my machine, and Eclipse (3.5, downloaded recently) shows a strange behaviour:

  • shows splash screen for less than a sec
  • quits

This is in 100% of the cases, so I can't start Eclipse at all.

Where can I find logs about this?

I deleted all eclipse resources and re-unzipped it. Same thing.

I have enough memory (IntelliJ runs fine), and my anti-virus software doesn't show any activity related to closing eclipse.

Any ideas what might have caused this?

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As other tools closely related to coding activities, I have always considered eclipse (like Git, SVN, ...) as a SO topic, certainly not a SU ("General computer software or hardware troubleshooting") topic. That being said, if you have your answer, that is all that matter. – VonC Jun 2 '10 at 19:36
1  
I reinstall JDK and JRE and my eclipse runs again :D – user85649 Jun 13 '11 at 17:37

migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 2 '10 at 18:58

5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Start it from the command-line and see if it produces any error messages.

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how exactly?... – Bozho Jun 2 '10 at 14:34
3  
On windows, it is best to use the console version of the executable when running from the command line, so something like "eclipsec -consoleLog -debug" might be useful. – Andrew Niefer Jun 2 '10 at 16:03
up vote 2 down vote

There's a .log file in the .metadata directory inside each workspace, which often contains a number of stack traces from the Eclipse internals. Startup crashes are usually found here. I'm assuming you have Eclipse configured to start up in a specific workspace automatically, without prompting you to pick one at startup.

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yes, but it was empty. It didn't get to the workspace resolution at all. – Bozho Jun 2 '10 at 14:31
1  
There can also be a <timestamp>.log file in the eclipse/configuration folder if we didn't get far enough to have a workspace. – Andrew Niefer Jun 2 '10 at 16:02
up vote 2 down vote

I added this in eclipse.ini:

-vm 
C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.6.0_20/jre/bin/javaw.exe

And it started. Then, however, one of my projects (a simple test project) did not resolve java.lang.String and java.lang.System. I changed the JRE to JDK/JRE, and it worked.

JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME were pointing to the above location.

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2  
The eclipse launcher does not consult JAVA_HOME or JRE_HOME. It looks on the system search path. This might be useful: wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox_Launcher – Andrew Niefer Jun 2 '10 at 16:06
+1 If the Java installation on the system is messed up, or if the system default Java VM does not work with Eclipse, this lets you explicitly tell Eclipse which VM to use. – sleske Jul 15 '10 at 21:53
up vote 1 down vote

Just for completeness: Try starting Eclipse with -clean (which re-scans the installed plugins and rebuilds the caches in $ECLIPSE_HOME/configuration).

Generally, you get back your projects after removing .metadata with import->existing projects.

Alteratively, some project's .settings may be damaged.

Look at the error stack (in .metadata/.log) to find out which plugin is making problems, and try to remove its prefs.

An easy way to try all this is to create a new workspace (start eclipse with -data if you don't get the dialog) and to manually copy the projects over.

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up vote 0 down vote

Open eclipse.ini. If the line -showsplash is there, remove it.

If it is not present, add -nosplash

I know it's strange recommending to not show the splash screen, but it occasionally causes issues on some machines / Java configurations.

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protected by Community♦ Jun 13 '11 at 23:20

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