I was just wondering if someone could help me install the Eclipse IDE on my debian sarge system. I understand that Eclipse is only available in the unstable/sid branch, so I updated my sources.list file in /etc/apt/ to point at an unstable mirror. I added the following entry to my sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian sid main

When I apt-get update, everything resolves fine. However, if I attempt to apt-cache search for eclipse, nothing shows up. I have already done this exact same procedure on my laptop and it worked flawlessly, but now for some reason the same exact thing on my desktop is not working. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks for any help.

Just find the eclipse folder in your file system.

Then run bin/eclipse

I think you misunderstood. When I try to install eclipse, it tells me it cannot find it. That means it is not on my system at all, and I cannot access it in /bin. The problem has to do with apt not being able to find it to download it and install it, even though I have the correct mirror entry in the sources.list file.

Maintaining packages from different branches for a single Debian install can
be a bit tricky. You can read more about How to keep a mixed system
here .
The most easiest way in the case of Eclipse is to download the binary from
eclipse.org and simply run the shell script (if you are using KDE you can even double click
on the shell script and eclipse will run). I use eclipse myself and thats how I got it
running on my machine.