I don't know if this is a problem on Jaunty anymore, but whatever. I had to do this on 8.10 to get Eclipse to actually run and function properly. In a word: printing. In more words: disable it. Who prints from Eclipse anyway? Add this as a vmarg in your eclipse.ini -Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.disablePrinting The long story: When I was at school, my Eclipse instance just would not start. Well, scratch that. A blank workspace would start fine, …