How to install Eclipse Luna on Ubuntu

The Ubuntu that I am using ships with an ancient 3.x version of Eclipse. However, switching to the latest Eclipse Luna version is easy:

• Download the latest Eclipse from here. Choose the package that matches what language you develop for. I work with C++, so I downloaded Eclipse CDT.

• Unzip the contents. This creates an eclipse directory. I prefer to rename that to the Eclipse version. I renamed mine to eclipse-luna-4.4.1.

• For convenience, move the directory to your ~/bin directory. I like to keep my binaries and programs in this directory.

• You can launch Eclipse by running the eclipse binary in the installation directory.

• If you want to install other plugins and language support for Eclipse, you can do that from Help -> Install New Software.

• For convenience, add a Dash entry for Eclipse using Main Menu as explained here. You can set the icon for this entry to the icon.xpm file that can be found inside the Eclipse directory. However, I found that the icon was only displayed when I edited the .desktop file of the entry, as described here, to set the full path correctly, including the .xpm file extension.

• If you would like to remove the ancient version of Eclipse installed by Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get remove eclipse-platform
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Tried with: Eclipse Luna 4.4.1 and Ubuntu 14.04