Installing Visual COBOL into other instances of Eclipse

Visual COBOL ships with Eclipse 4.7 (64-bit).

After installing Visual COBOL, you can then also install it in other instances of Eclipse available on the same machine. The supported version of Eclipse are 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8 (requires Visual COBOL 4.0 Patch Update 4 or later) for both 32-bit and 64-bit Eclipse.

Note: On Red Hat, you need at least version 7 to be able to plug Visual COBOL into Eclipse 4.8 (requires Visual COBOL 4.0 Patch Update 4 or later).

To assist you with automatically installing the Micro Focus plug-ins in other instances of Eclipse, Visual COBOL provides an installation utility, installeclipseplugins 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 <EclipsePath> -version <version> [-cobdir <CobdirPath>] [-nosplash]

    where:

    EclipsePath
    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 4.6, and 4.7 for both 32-bit and 64-bit Eclipse.
    CobdirPath
    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 does not replace the existing splash screen. A non-default Eclipse splash screen is not 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.