John Ruiz, Software Engineer

If you start eclipse (or springsource tool suite) and get the following popup: you need to point eclipse to a JDK. You can't do this within the IDE itself so just close it. Then go to the directory where you have eclipse installed. Edit eclipse.ini in an editor that understands unix-style line endings (like notepad++ or wordpad). If you're running STS, the file will be called STS.ini instead of eclipse.ini. Look for the -vmargs line and insert a new line BEFORE it that specifies the location to your JDK's javaw executable. Like so:

Having spent the majority of my professional life on Windows with .NET, I'm not much of a Java troubleshooter. I speak the language and am familiar with a slew of frameworks, but I just don't know the JVM like I know the CLR. Yet. Additionally, I notice that the Java community loves to follow the newest hottest thing far more than the .NET community. One example of this is Java's love/hate relationship with XML. Back when Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) was the hot buzzword, we started to see a lot of configuration done in XML. XML Configuration files became huge and unwieldy. People started to talk about "XML Hell" and eventually, we started moving towards "convention over configuration". I'm a fan of focused, opinionated software - and I definitely think convention over configuration is the right way to go in the majority of circumstances... but some people have gone beyond convention over configuration into: loathing and avoidance o...

3/26/2012 update: I've now done this on CentOS 6.2 as well. Since I've had to do this a number of times in the last few months, I thought I should post this here so I can't forget it. Here's some specifics on what I'm using: Windows Server 2008 R2 As dc1.devexample.com (192.168.0.201) As Primary Domain Controller of devexample.com As Windows Server 2008 R2 forest functional level CentOS 5 / CentOS 6 As app01.devexample.com (192.168.0.203) Samba 3.5.6 / Samba 3.6.3 An internet connection. If you are not going to have an internet connection, you'll want to pre-download the files you'll need. I suggest using 'yum downloadonly' to get them. I've spun up a brand new CentOS 5.5 VM and logged in. Oh man, does anyone else just love logging into a fresh install? Is my nerd showing? Sorry! The first thing I need to do is take on great responsibility, so for that I'm going to need great power: let's add my account to the su...