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Problem: Whenever I try to run an executable file with a command such as ./file or just double-clicking nothing happens and I get this returned in the terminal.

  • cannot execute binary file: Exec format error

What I am trying to achieve: I am now just trying to install the latest version of eclipse (4.7 AKA Oxygen) using the executable file (not .exe and is 32-bit called "eclipse-inst") on a 32-bit OS (Ubuntu MATE 16.04) using a 32-bit processor. Of course, it returns with the text above.

What I am using to run Linux:

Things to note:

  • Installer is made for 32-bit Linux which I'm using

  • Again, I'm using ARM

  • The file I'm trying to install is in /home/user/Downloads. Please let me know if there is a specific place I need to install from. That would be very helpful.

David Foerster
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Anoraki
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1 Answers1

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You can't run Intel x86 executables on ARM CPUs because the latter don't understand the instruction set of the former (even though both have a word length of 32 bit).

However, you can install Eclipse from Ubuntu's software repositories which contains an armhf build of it:

  1. Enable the “universe” repository section (see How do I enable the “Universe” repository?), if you haven't already, and update the package list after the change:

    sudo apt update

  2. Install the package:

    sudo apt install eclipse

Unfortunately, the version of Eclipse in the repositories is pretty old (over 3 years) and building a recent version from source is non-trivial. I also doubt that you're going to have much fun with a resource-heavy interactive application like Eclipse on a low-resource system with an ARM A7 like yours. If you want to develop software for ARM systems you may want to look into cross-compilation which would allow you to develop software on your (x86-compatible) desktop computer which then runs on other platforms (ARM).

David Foerster
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