I’ve had few people ask me about this error recently.
So far, everybody who’s asked is using a Mac running OS X and they all seem to be running El Capitan 10.11. I’m not a Mac user myself, so narrowing down the exact symptoms was a bit of a challenge.
The message is pretty clear, assuming that you haven’t already installed a newer version of Java, but it’s darned confusing if you already have a Java 7 (1.7) or Java 8 (1.8) JRE or JDK installed. My immediate (validated) assumption was that Eclipse was having trouble finding the right JRE. It was not, however, immediately obvious how to solve it (perhaps it might have been if I had ever actually used Java on a Mac).
It took a few iterations before I was able sort out the magical search terms, but I did eventually find a promising StackOverflow article.
The short version is this… Execute /usr/libexec/java_home from a command line. It should tell you which version of Java is being resolved as the default and allow you to change it. You can also use this utility to find the path of a particular JRE that you can use to configure the -vm option in your eclipse.ini file.
The folks that I’ve been working with report that this fixes things nicely. Again, however, I’m not a Mac user, so your mileage may vary.
