Eclipse Update Failing with Message “Insufficient access privileges to apply this update”

Question

I\'m running Eclipse under a Windows 7, 64-bit installation on which I have administrator privileges.

Since I first installed Eclipse many months ago, I\'ve been able to

Answer 1

Solving the problem was a multi-step process for me:

1. In a thread on another forum I found the advice that Eclipse should not be installed in C:\Program Files (x86). I had indeed installed (unzipped) it into that folder, so I moved it as advised to C:\Users\....
2. When I loaded Eclipse in its new location, I got a different message when I attempted to scan for updates: "There are no update sites to search".
3. I temporarily re-established my installation in C:\Program Files (x86), loaded it, and used Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites > [select all] > Export... to create an .xml file with my software sites.
4. Back in the C:\Users\... installation, I used the the same menu command (except Import instead of Export) to pull in the contents of that .xml file.

Now Help > Check for Updates is again functioning as it used to.

Answer 2

Hit same problem on Macos sierra 10.12.3 after clean install of Eclipse JEE Neon R. A clue was that my mac showed a dialog when I launched the app that asked:

“Eclipse.app” is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?

When the updater dialog box showed "Insufficient access privileges to apply this update" I checked the Eclipse.app directory (I had downloaded & unpacked the .tar.gz file, if that matters) and saw this:

 drwxrwxr-x@  3 chris  staff         102 Jun 13  2016 Eclipse.app

I examined the extended attribute and saw this:

$ xattr Eclipse.app
com.apple.quarantine

That quarantine attribute seems to block the Eclipse updater! I removed that extended attribute like this:

xattr -d -r Eclipse.app

After that Eclipse updated itself very happily. HTH

Answer 3

For anyone using Linux: I had this problem in Ubuntu because I had installed Eclipse in /opt, which was owned by root.

To get the updates, simply run Eclipse as root and then select the Help -> Check for Updates again. In general running applications as root is not a good idea, but if it's just to do an update... well that's what the root account is for :)

cd /opt/eclipse
sudo ./eclipse