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Joe DeRose
Joe DeRose

Reputation: 3558

Eclipse Update Failing with Message "Insufficient access privileges to apply this update"

I'm running Eclipse under a Windows 7, 64-bit installation on which I have administrator privileges.

Since I first installed Eclipse many months ago, I've been able to keep it up to date with the Help > Check for Updates function—but starting a couple of weeks ago, it gave the message

Insufficient access privileges to apply this update.

Even when I ran Eclipse as an administrator, I continued to get this message. How can I fix it?

Upvotes: 27

Views: 19988

Answers (9)

JesseBoyd
JesseBoyd

Reputation: 1096

For Linux Distros, most personal apps for all users are installed in the /opt/ folder. This folder is owned by root. My solution which has been tested to work is simply to open the opt folder in terminal call 'ls' to make sure you see the 'eclipse' folder in your current directory. It may be inside another folder.

Then simply use this command replacing 'user' with your username.

sudo chown -R user:user eclipse/

and that's it. Of course only you will be able to run updates on eclipse but I imagine you are the primary user of the computer.

Upvotes: 6

Martin
Martin

Reputation: 1435

I found a workaround for this stupid bug in Eclipse. Selecting updates one-by-one is disabled, but if you click Select all and then deselect the ones you do not need, you can proceed.

Upvotes: 13

Robert Brooker
Robert Brooker

Reputation: 2508

From Powershell, I set permissions on the folder like so:

& icacls "C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\eclipse-java-neon\eclipse" "/grant" "domain\user:(OI)(CI)F" "/T"

Note: I had a different install location, as I used chocolatey to install eclipse

Upvotes: 0

chrisinmtown
chrisinmtown

Reputation: 4344

Hit same problem on Macos sierra 10.12.3 after clean install of Eclipse JEE Neon R. A clue was that my mac showed a dialog when I launched the app that asked:

“Eclipse.app” is an application downloaded from the Internet. Are you sure you want to open it?

When the updater dialog box showed "Insufficient access privileges to apply this update" I checked the Eclipse.app directory (I had downloaded & unpacked the .tar.gz file, if that matters) and saw this:

 drwxrwxr-x@  3 chris  staff         102 Jun 13  2016 Eclipse.app

I examined the extended attribute and saw this:

$ xattr Eclipse.app
com.apple.quarantine

That quarantine attribute seems to block the Eclipse updater! I removed that extended attribute like this:

xattr -d -r Eclipse.app

After that Eclipse updated itself very happily. HTH

Upvotes: 6

Andy King
Andy King

Reputation: 1662

In Windows another option is to set the "Run as administrator" property on the Eclipse shortcut that you're using to start Eclipse. Right click on the shortcut and choose "Properties" from the dropdown menu. Click on the "Shortcut" tab in the Properties dialog and then click on the "Advanced..." button. In the Advanced Properties dialog set the "Run as administrator" option.

Upvotes: 7

Zip184
Zip184

Reputation: 1890

I fixed this problem (windows) by re-opening eclipse by right-clicking the eclipse.exe and selecting "Run as administrator".

Not sure why this step was needed all of the sudden but it worked. After my upgrade (I upgraded from eclipse sdk 4.3 -> 4.4) it still lets me make updates without running as administrator.

Upvotes: 3

tbeernot
tbeernot

Reputation: 2612

Another (simpler?) approach which worked for me is to simply give the group "Users" write permission on C:\Program Files (x86)\eclipse.

Now, this is a security consideration, but you're NOT granting access to the whole of C:\Program Files (x86), just the eclipse installation.

Upvotes: 17

Chris Clark
Chris Clark

Reputation: 1477

For anyone using Linux: I had this problem in Ubuntu because I had installed Eclipse in /opt, which was owned by root.

To get the updates, simply run Eclipse as root and then select the Help -> Check for Updates again. In general running applications as root is not a good idea, but if it's just to do an update... well that's what the root account is for :)

cd /opt/eclipse
sudo ./eclipse

Upvotes: 33

Joe DeRose
Joe DeRose

Reputation: 3558

Solving the problem was a multi-step process for me:

  1. In a thread on another forum I found the advice that Eclipse should not be installed in C:\Program Files (x86). I had indeed installed (unzipped) it into that folder, so I moved it as advised to C:\Users\....
  2. When I loaded Eclipse in its new location, I got a different message when I attempted to scan for updates: "There are no update sites to search".
  3. I temporarily re-established my installation in C:\Program Files (x86), loaded it, and used Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites > [select all] > Export... to create an .xml file with my software sites.
  4. Back in the C:\Users\... installation, I used the the same menu command (except Import instead of Export) to pull in the contents of that .xml file.

Now Help > Check for Updates is again functioning as it used to.

Upvotes: 3

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