The Eclipse launcher has always required a graphics library (ie GTK, Motif) to show error messages and display the splash screen. It can't even start if the library is not found. This is a problem for people who have headless Eclipse applications that run in places without such luxuries.
I raised a bug to track this issue. Though I should point out that bug is incorrect in its description of the launcher's linking: the launcher is dynamically linked to the graphics libraries, (not statically linked as the bug says). The problem is that these dependencies are resolved at loadtime, not runtime. The fix is to load the graphics libraries at runtime using dlopen and lookup all the functions we need to call using dlsym.
I have created launchers for GTK and Motif that do this and attached them in bugzilla. These changes require more testing before I release them to CVS. People should try them out and give feedback on the bug.
One thing to note is that the Motif version is using a DT_RPATH tag to help find the libXm.so.2 library that ships on linux in the root of Eclipse. Most of what I've read suggests this is obsolete and not a good idea, so that will probably change.
