the corner office

Somewhere between learning about ls and rm, one's introduction to the world of Linux will include a full indoctrination into the danger of working as root. To this day, when I su into a root terminal, I feel a little dirty. This is different to the Windows world, where most people I know (including myself) don't think twice about putting themselves into the administrator group when setting up the OS.

I digress. Not having admin rights means that it's not as easy to use the Eclipse update manager to install plug-ins to system directories, because your normal user account doesn't have permission to put files there (and firing up Eclipse as root to do it is just, well, even more dirty-feeling). I usually revert to manually setting up plugins (also allows me keep the install files archived), but it's a bit of a schlep going into the eclipse program directory to do it. I did a quick search and found two blog posts (here and here) which helped me to set up an independent directory as an external plugin site, and then link to it as an extension. This keeps your basic Eclipse installation clean, and it means that if you automatically update your installation a la Gentoo, you have less hassles keeping your plug-ins functional across upgrades.