Aptana plugin crashes Eclipse

Question

I use Eclipse EE Indigo on a Ubuntu 11.04 laptop. I use the Sun JDK. When I installed the aptana plugin using help/install new software and then installed aptana by pasting

http://download.aptana.com/studio3/plugin/install

into the "work with" field, it installed just fine and then prompted me to restart Eclipse. Now, I cannot start Eclipse anymore at all. It opens but crashes, seemingly when trying to initiate the aptana plugin.

This is a major problem for me because my Eclipse was already very customized and I need to be able to work. I haven't been able to find any info on how to solve this issue on the web. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I noticed that right before Eclipse crashes, this message from the Aptana plugin is printed in the console: aptana javascript scripting console started

Answer 1

I found an emergency fix that allowed me to start using Eclipse again. It is very blunt and NOT the way you'd expect to deal with problems like this, alas, it seems at least my Eclipse is up and running again.

Because Eclipse crashed very shortly after having started up, it was impossible to uninstall the plugin that crashed it. What I did was the following:

• Make sure Eclipse is not running.
• Make a backup copy of the Eclipse folder.

• Navigate to the folder in the terminal

• Execute this command in terminal:

  find . -name *aptana* -exec rm -rf {} \;
  

Note that this works for me because I am the owner and have the necessary permissions to perform this operation in my Eclipse folder. If you are not the owner of the Eclipse folder, or if you lack some permissions, chances are you may have to insert sudo before the rest of the command in order for it to work.

This command will search the current folder and all subfolders for any files and folders that has the string aptana in their names, and delete all of them.

• Execute

  find . -name *aptana*
  

in terminal to confirm that there is nothing left. There should be no results when running this command. If you get some results, then all aptana files and folders have still not been deleted.

• Should the previous command leave no results, start Eclipse.

• Go to Help/Install new software and then click What is already installed?

• Select the Aptana plugin and press uninstall.

• Restart Eclipse when prompted to do so.

Eclipse should now work just like before you installed Aptana. At least my Eclipse seems to do so.