This is just a quick post. I've had numerous problems with eclipse 3.2 PDT and Aptana on my Hardy Heron install; updates have broken functionality in the past and many problems with memory allocation. After installing the PyDev plugin the other night to try out Django my PDT and Aptana installs were destroyed and so I had to look at my Eclipse install again.
First to note I installed NetBeans to try that out and while NetBeans installed very easily and seemed to work well on Ubuntu I have my mind set to Eclipse, all the shortcuts etc. Back to Eclipse, the first problem was the version: 3.2. This is the version in the repository for Ubuntu as far as I can tell and in retropect it may well have been the cause for so many of my problems.
I opted to uninstall Eclipse from Synaptic Package manager and start fresh with Eclipse, keeping my install of java as I've already installed java6 jdk.
To install Eclipse 3.3 on Ubuntu 8.04 follow that link, its really everything you need to do. The only note I would make is for this step:
and insert /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun on the top of file
I had to make a symbolic link in /usr/lib/jvm/ for this to work previously in order to point java-6-sun to java-6-sun-1.6.0.07. All the steps on that page worked perfectly for me.
After finishing all those instructions you should have Eclipse 3.3 installed, but it was lacking a shortcut in the programming menu. So to add to the panel as a shortcut I needed to create a symbolic link to run eclipse (for simplicity) and also download a suitable icon (I couldn't find the icon file for eclipse at all).
cd ~/bin/
ln -s /usr/local/opt/eclipse/eclipse eclipse