Installing Visual COBOL into other instances of Eclipse

Visual COBOL ships with Eclipse 4.6 (64-bit) but can be installed in other instances of Eclipse available on the same machine. The supported version of Eclipse are 4.6 for 64-bit Eclipse and 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.5, and 4.6 for 32-bit Eclipse.

Note: If you are installing Visual COBOL into Eclipse 4.5, or 4.6, you must install the Eclipse Target Management plugins into the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers package (32-bit):
  1. Click Help > Install New Software in Eclipse and add a new repository for the location http://download.eclipse.org/tm/updates/4.0.
  2. Expand RSE 3.8 Main Features, check RSE Terminals UI (Deprecated) and complete the installation of the plugin.

To assist you with automatically installing the Micro Focus plug-ins in other instances of Eclipse, Visual COBOL provides an installation utility, installeclipseplugins (UNIX) available in /opt/microfocus/VisualCOBOL/eclipse.

To use the script to install Visual COBOL into another instance of Eclipse:

  1. Start a terminal.
  2. At the terminal, navigate to the location of the install utility.
  3. Run the install utility from the command prompt using the following syntax:
    installeclipseplugins -eclipse <EclipseInstallDir> -version <version> [-cobdir <InstallDir>] [-nosplash]

    Where:

    • EclipseInstallDir - full path to the installation directory of the instance of Eclipse you are installing into.
    • version - version number of the instance of Eclipse that you are installing into. The valid version numbers are 4.4.1, 4.4.2, 4.5, and 4.6 for 32-bit Eclipse and 4.6 for 64-bit Eclipse.
    • InstallDir - optional. The full path to the installation directory of Visual COBOL. If this is not specified, the COBDIR environment variable is used.
    • -nosplash - optional. If set, the installation will not replace the existing splash screen. A non-default Eclipse splash screen will not be replaced, regardless of this setting.
    Note: To install into a 32-bit version of Eclipse ensure that your PATH is set to a 32-bit version of Java. The default COBDIR location, in UNIX environments, /opt/microfocus/ProductName. Alternatively, the COBDIR can be specified on the command line.

    Running the utility installs the Visual COBOL plug-ins into the specified version of Eclipse and copies the Visual COBOL UpdateSite folders into EclipseInstallDir/eclipse/dropins.