Eclipse Crashing with SIGSEGV, Problematic Frame libgdk and/or libsoup Problem Solved

I’m setting up a new workstation under Fedora Core 20 and getting my dev environment set up.

I had copied over my /opt dir from my old machine which included an older version of Eclipse (3.8.2) that I had been using.  That version wasn’t behaving very well and I decided to go with the latest and greatest stable version (Kepler, 4.3.1).

Unfortunately, Kepler was dumping core with the following error:

 A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:

  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00000030f703d09a, pid=2450, tid=139984564643584

 JRE version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (7.0_51-b13) (build 1.7.0_51-b13)
 Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (24.51-b03 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)
 Problematic frame:
 C  [libgdk-x11-2.0.so.0+0x3d09a]  g_param_spec_object+0x3d09a

 Core dump written. Default location: /home/rchapin/core or core.2450

I realized that I had installed Acrobat Reader, and since I’m on a 64 bit architecture that included all of the i686 rpms and compatibility libs.  I thought that that for some reason there might be some confusion between which version of libgdk that was being used.  That wasn’t it.  I tried a different JDK (Oracle vs OpenJDK), nope, that wasn’t it either.

Eventually, I tried deleting (actually moving aside) the .eclipse/ dir in my home dir and deleting all of the .classpath, .settings, and .project files and dirs in my workspace and then re-installing my Eclipse plugins for Kepler.

Worked like a charm.

What I think was happening was that some of the plugins for different versions of Eclipse were being pulled in at runtime and causing the Kepler binary to crash.

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