Installing the Eclipse CDT 4.0 SDK

I just started to play around with the Eclipse IDE and the C++/C Development Tools plug-in, called CDT. One task that I tried to accomplish was to extend the plug-in to allow printing of PDF files, following this tutorial. But to extend CDT, you also need the CDT SDK, which does not come by default with Eclipse. Moreover it is even hard to find at the CDT download page! After a lot of searching, I found a comment on one of the CDT developers’ blogs with a link to the SDK but no instructions on how to automatically install it. So I decided to write my own guide, because others might find it useful. It is based on this guide (CDT 3.0), but updated to work with the latest CDT version 4.0.

In case if you already know how to install the CDT SDK, here is the download link: http://update.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/europa/

Requirements
I am going to assume that you already have the Eclipse IDE installed and working. For this tutorial I am using Eclipse 3.3.2 on Linux.

Instructions

1. 
   Start Eclipse and click on Help->Software Updates->Find and Install… to start the plugin installer.
2. 
   In the window that pops up, make sure to select “Search for new features to install” and click Next.
3. 
   In the next page of the update manager, click the New Remote site button. This should bring up a new dialog as pictured above. Set the name to “C/C++ Development Tools” and URL to “http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/europa“. Click OK to hide the dialog, check the “Automatically select mirrors” box at the bottom, and then hit Finish to continue. The C/C++ Development Tools site should be checked automatically in the list.
4. A download box should appear. Just let it do it’s thing, at the end you should see a new dialog appear with a list of available features.
5. 
   Check the toplevel checkbox that says “C/C++ Development Tools” to install everything. If you want to install only parts of CDT, then expand the tree and select components one by one. You can find the CDT 4.0 SDK under C/C++ Development Tools -> CDT Main Features. Click next to continue.
6. 
   The next step is to accept the license agreements. After you have read them, click on the “I accept the terms in the license agreements” radio box, and then click Next to continue.
7. The next page will just be a summary of the files that will be installed. After you have reviewed it, just click the Finish button to download and install the CDK plugin!
8. Wait for the plugin to download and install. This might take some time, as the package is quite large… From time to time, you might see messages about the package being digitally signed and verified. You can bypass these messages by clicking the “Install All” button at the bottom of the dialog.
9. The final step is to restart Eclipse to load the newly installed CDT plugin and it’s SDK. To do this, just hit the Yes button in the dialog that will automatically popup at the end of the installation.