I’ve moved from 32bit Ubuntu 10.04 to a 64bit Debian Squeeze recently. No important reasons for abandoning Ubuntu, I just felt more like going Debian for a change. Unfortunately, I run into a new kind of bug when I tried to install some Eclipse plugins, and it turns out that all Java networking is broken…
The reason behind this is some (I’m not an expert in this field) internet protocol changes, i.e. defaulting to IPv6 by some means. Well, that’s nice, but it broke the damn Eclipse I can’t live without! Seems like Debian folks don’t care too much about Java apps 🙂
Anyway, the bug is reported for a long time and apparently it is fixed in OpenJDK (though some user complained about not being fixed): http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=560044
Long story short: if you experience similar problems with Eclipse, just add the following line to your eclipse.ini file:
-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true
Since that fixes only your Eclipse app (and nothing else) you should probably change the global setting via following commands, but I’m not sure what else gets affected and how smart is it to mendle with the system, but anyway:
# sed -i 's/net.ipv6.bindv6only\ =\ 1/net.ipv6.bindv6only\ =\ 0/' \ /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf && invoke-rc.d procps restart
I hope that fixed it for you as it did for me! Happy Hacking and see you on DebConf11 in Bosnia next year!
Srecko Toroman 