If you’ve ever tried to setup a runtime server in Ganymede, you’ll find that the Tomcat 5.5 installation in Ubuntu doesn’t work with it. The problem is that Ubuntu staggers the installation location of Tomcat 5.5 and create symlinks to link all these directory together. When attempting to specify location of the tomcat installation, Eclipse will complain of missing directories (/common/i18n for example).

One solution for this problem is to create a directory with symlinks to link all the staggered directories. These are the symlinks needed:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 2007-07-25 00:56 bin -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/bin
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2007-07-25 00:57 common -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/common
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 2007-07-25 00:56 conf -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 2007-07-25 00:56 logs -> /var/log/tomcat5.5/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2007-07-25 00:57 server -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/server
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 2007-07-25 00:57 shared -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/shared
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 2007-07-25 00:57 temp -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/temp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 2007-07-25 00:58 webapps -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5-webapps
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 2007-07-25 00:57 work -> /usr/share/tomcat5.5/work

To create a symlink for /usr/share/tomcat5.5/bin, navigate to the directory to place the symlink (say /opt/tomcat) then run the command ‘sudo ln-s /usr/share/tomcat5.5/bin‘. This will place a symlink for ‘bin‘. After creating all the symlinks, proceed to setup your Eclipse Ganymede.