Comment 28 for bug 549904

Niels, I don't nor do I recommend starting eclipse as root. The exercise was required so as to resolve the permissions issues, which I was able to do. It would be helpful, should you be part of the team that packages eclipse for ubuntu, if you would disclose the metadata you refer to, so I can better understand what you do to help seat eclipse, and perhaps make changes to my configuration.

With regards to the "proper" location for software on linux systems, I expect you'd find a great deal of disagreement with your assertions. Let's see, the directory is /usr/lib, which should be quite telling. Every other piece of installed software, by & large, finds its home there. At runtime, eclipse stores all its metadata in the workspace designated at startup, either as a command line parameter, in the eclipse.ini or in perference settings.