Hey i just downloaded The Eclipse SDK and it requires either the java SDK or jRE installed. This is what it says:
A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK)
must be available in order to run Eclipse. No Java virtual machine
was found after searching the following locations:
/usr/lib/j2sdk1.4-sun/bin/java

i downloaded the latest version from the java site.

I entered commands into my terminal after install:

[sudo apt-get install java-common]

And it comes up with..

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
java-common is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 136 not upgraded.

im guessing this means i have the newest version installed, but i dont know how i can link it with eclipse??? i have managed to install the jre6 using the terminal but dont know where to go from there, my files are in my home drive.. Thanks in advance..

So how exactly did you get and install java and eclipse? From the repositories? From another site? I installed both from the repositories and that's all I had to do.

On Fedora I used the packages from sun and eclipse.org instead. To get eclipse to work, I set the proper path in /etc/profile.
In /etc/profile, you would add this:
JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk
export JAVA_HOME

You can do that from the command line like this:
echo JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk >> /etc/profile
echo export JAVA_HOME >> /etc/profile

Then you need to log out or do
source /etc/profile

And then (as root) you can check whether the path is correct by doing:
echo $JAVA_HOME

Btw, if you're using eclipse 3.2.2, don't be surprised if it crashes at start-up, it has a bug.