Java – “The eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library”

eclipsejava

Firstly I know there are a lot of people asking this already and I have checked all of them and none of them have fixed my issue.

Whenever I try to open Eclipse Neon I get this error

The eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library

As said I have tried the fixes I have seen online including uninstalling Eclipse and java then reinstalling.

Eclipse was working a few weeks back but stopped when a windows update failed and I reverted to a previous state of windows. That's the only thing I can think of that may have caused this.

Best Answer

This solution worked for me:

As administrator (on MS-Windows, or as root or using sudo on GNU/Linux):

  1. uninstall* Eclipse

    • in the Eclipse installer "Bundle Pool" menu: "Cleanup Agent" then "Delete"

    • quit the installer

    • manually remove the existing installation folder if needed

  2. start the Eclipse installer

  3. turn off the "Bundle Pools" feature (in the installer menu)

  4. select the Eclipse flavor (e.g: Eclipse IDE for Java developers)

  5. select "Install"

As a plain user:

  1. start Eclipse

Side comments:

The Eclipse installer is maybe powerful, but in practice it is painful:

  • if one doesn't pay extra attention when running the installer several times, you soon have several install directories without noticing (java-neon, java-neon2, java-neon3) instead of a single updated folder

  • the proxy manager is buggy (I couldn't get it to work in my GNU/Linux environment, I had to set http_proxy and https_proxy myself in a terminal and then launch the installer)

I find it was easier in the past to install Eclipse, when there was no installer and only tar.gz or ZIP file to extract.

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