Eclipse SDK 3.4.1 under xubuntu 8.04

Today I wanted to install eclipse on my rather old desktop machine which runs on xubuntu 8.04. First I tried to use the package manager as described here. I did not trust my eyes when I first started it up: Eclipse 3.2! As I need Eclipse 3.4 I removed the just installed old eclipse and downloaded the lastest release of Eclipse SDK directly from eclipse .
After "un-taring" the whole thing into "/opt" with the sudo command I followed the forum thread as mentioned above to use Sun's JDK instead of the built in GNU Java. Everything worked fine until I started the brand new eclipse with my normal working user.... I got the following exception and the workbench didn't come up:

me@mymachine:/opt/eclipse$ ./eclipse
!SESSION 2008-11-08 18:28:24.055 -----------------------------------------------
eclipse.buildId=M20080911-1700
java.version=1.6.0_07
java.vendor=Sun Microsystems Inc.
BootLoader constants: OS=linux, ARCH=x86, WS=gtk, NL=de_DE
Command-line arguments: -os linux -ws gtk -arch x86

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 4 0 2008-11-08 18:28:24.525
!MESSAGE Error reading configuration: /opt/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/.manager/.fileTableLock (No such file or directory)
!STACK 0
java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/.manager/.fileTableLock (No such file or directory)
at java.io.RandomAccessFile.open(Native Method)
at java.io.RandomAccessFile.(RandomAccessFile.java:212)
[....]

Damn! Another round of googling... . Unfortunately Google only spit out one post - in italian. Luckily with some knowledge of french I figured out that the exception must be a sort of permission problem.
A snippet from this weblog finally solved the permission problem.

Before launching eclipse with root user make sure all files in /opt/eclipse are owned by root user:

clebeaupin@atalante:~/tmp$ sudo chown -R root:root /opt/eclipse

Yeah! Now I can start coding... :-) Perhaps this description could help someone who is also struggling with this problem.

Performance Tuning for Eclipse Ganymede

As a java developer I am using Eclipse at work. By adopting to Eclipse Ganymede some days ago, we encountered serious performance issues, especially while the workspace was compiling. The complete IDE was blocked while building the sources, even on a dual core system with 4 GB RAM.
After googling a while, we found out a combination of VM parameters that seem to work fine. Here's what is currently running on my machine (a dual core with 3 GB RAM): __path_to_eclipse__ -showlocation -vm __path_to_java_6_vm__ -vmargs -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=512m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -Dide.gc=true -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+ExplicitGCInvokesConcurrent
With this configuration, I am able to work while the thousands of projects are compiling happily in the background. ;-)
What are your experiences using Eclipse as a Java IDE concerning performance?