Eclipse has multiple issues after JRE-6 (OpenJDK) upgrade

I'm on 12.04 LTS, and trying to use Eclipse Indigo.

This morning Ubuntu made me update the following packages:

Preparing to replace icedtea-6-jre-cacao 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../icedtea-6-jre-cacao_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement icedtea-6-jre-cacao ...
Preparing to replace openjdk-6-jre-lib 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../openjdk-6-jre-lib_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement openjdk-6-jre-lib ...
Preparing to replace icedtea-6-jre-jamvm 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../icedtea-6-jre-jamvm_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement icedtea-6-jre-jamvm ...
Preparing to replace openjdk-6-jre-headless 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../openjdk-6-jre-headless_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement openjdk-6-jre-headless ...
Preparing to replace openjdk-6-jre 6b24-1.11.3-1ubuntu0.12.04.1 (using .../openjdk-6-jre_6b24-1.11.4-1ubuntu0.12.04.1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement openjdk-6-jre ...

After that (but I cannot swear it is the root cause), I have the following issues in Eclipse:

• When trying to launch the simplest HelloWorld program (which behaves fine with manual javac/java), I get either nothing or:

  An internal error occurred during: "Launching HelloWorld".
  org/eclipse/jdt/debug/core/JDIDebugModel

• I get an "Error log" tab in the console panel, with an error:

  Could not create the view: An unexpected exception was thrown.

  (Follows a consequent NullPointerException stacktrace between sun.util.calendar.ZoneInfoFile.getZoneIDs(ZoneInfoFile.java:785) and org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main.main(Main.java:1386))

• When trying to access the Installed JREs part of the preferences, I get a popup saying:

  Unable to create the selected preference page.
  An error occurred while automatically activating bundle org.eclipse.jdt.debug.ui (162).

  And the preference tab says An error has occurred when creating this preference page.

Until today I had a manually installed Eclipse (one of the official bundles available on their site), I've tried to replace it by the repository version and I get the same errors.

What should I do to make Eclipse work again?

Another person reports: Same happened to me after updating last night. Already tried reinstalling Eclipse and Java, starting Eclipse with -clean and starting new workspace and new .eclipse dir, but nothing helps.

I had exactly the same problem today. First, a little googling brought me to your issue (didn't assumed to be due to OpenJDK). After a little more research, finally solved this strange behaviour: have a look at this ubuntu-bug.

So the quick solution is just to run sudo apt-get --reinstall install tzdata-java (reinstalling Time zone and daylight-saving time data for use by java runtimes)

Cheers

No idea why, but putting the line

-Dcom.ibm.icu.util.TimeZone.DefaultTimeZoneType=ICU

at the end of eclipse.ini seems to have solved the issue.

Yes, Brüno's answer worked for me too! It also fixed a bug that this caused in the application I am developing. Since a recent package upgrade in which the cacao virtual machine was removed, timestamps in my database that were in daylight savings time were interpreted incorrectly (off by one hour). But reinstalling tzdata-java fixed that too.