Eclipse is not mere an IDE, it's smart!
Open source community and non-profit organization.
"Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft and Webgain formed the initial eclipse.org Board of Stewards in November 2001".

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p>As the moon eclipses the sun, your mind would be eclipsed by Eclipse such that you fall in <3 with this smart peace of technology, it has a lavish support on different coding languages and many plug-ins to meet your needs.

All in all it a must try and one of the famous IDE, all most all the coder are aware of.

$ sudo apt-get install eclipse will install Eclipse 3.5!

But to get it from the source and install we can follow the steps below :

$ sudo su 
$ cd /opt
$ wget <your_edition>
$ tar xzvf eclipse-java-galileo-linux-gtk*.tar.gz 
$ mv eclipse eclipse3.5
$ cd /bin ; sudo nano eclipse
 
Add the below and save 
 
#/usr/bin/bash
`/opt/eclipse3.5/eclipse -vmargs -Xms128M -Xmx512M -XX:PermSize=128M -XX:MaxPermSize=512M &> /dev/null` &
 
The PermSize is from 128MB to 512MB , may be changed as per your RAM.
 
$ chmod u+x ~/bin/eclipse
 
You can then create an customized application launcher with the normal procedure.

For the easy of it, i have attached a file which gives you the steps to just run it from your terminal.