Eclipse problems

[Vaughn Treude]

Hello all:
I was quite impressed with the Feb 5th Eclipse presentation and have been 
enthused about the possibility of using it to replace my current Linux IDE.  
I've downloaded it and gotten it running, but I've been encountering a few 
problems.  I have googled for possible solution but there's so much info out 
there I can't separate the wheat from the chaff.  So I'd appreciate it if 
anyone has encountered these problems:

1. I downloaded the C++ plugin cdt-1.2.1.zip, and I unzipped it into the 
plugins directory as I was told to do.  But when I restart Eclipse, it 
complains about missing "cdt core" components, and won't show C++ as an 
option under the "new projects" list.  Yet this was supposed to be a 
"complete" installation.
2.  Does Eclipse have a good visual programming plugin (either open-source or 
reasonably priced commerical) on a par with Delphi or Visual C++?  (I have a 
Kylix project I would like to port to Eclipse if possible. ) I downloaded a 
plugin called VE, which I thought was supposed to be a visual editor, but 
Eclipse won't even see it.  When I google-search for a visual programming 
plugin I get about 500 hits on a "visual programming for web pages" plugin, 
which sounds cool, but it's not what I need!
3.  I'm attempting to run Eclipse on a RH 7.3 installation.  When I start 
Eclipse it complains about the gtk libraries being too old.  Is this a 
serious problem?  For various reasons, I do not want to upgrade this system.  
I have been attempting to upgrade the gtk libraries - hopefully this won't 
hose my system, but there are so many dependencies I haven't successfully 
done it yet.  I have tried compiling some of the dependent libraries from 
source, but haven't found them all yet either.  Do you think I can ignore the 
gtk warning message?  (I just got my sound and DVD working, and I don't want 
to mess it up by upgrading the whole install!  Side note:  I have a newer 
faster system I'd prefer to use for Eclipse development, but for some bizarre 
hardware-related reason that one is unstable on the newer 2.4 kernels - from 
the logs it appears to be a power management issue, and I can't completely 
disable this "feature" in bios, so I've been forced to keep the system in 
question on Mandrake 8.  Eclipse won't even start in a distro that old, so 
I'm kind of stuck using the Red Hat system.)

If I can get this working, I'll gladly share any Eclipse experience with the 
group, and help other folks get started if I can.

Thanks!
Vaughn Treude
Nakota Software, Inc.