[t.estell]

I started with a clean install of Ubuntu 14.04 on an older Intel i5 laptop with 4G of RAM. The total install with the simulator requires about 8G on the hard drive. After completing the install I fetched all the updates and verified the system was stable.

Add the Oracle Java 8 and the FRC toolchain to the default repositories then install.
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:byteit101/frc-toolchain
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install frc-toolchain oracle-java8-installer oracle-java8-set-default libc6-i386 python-webkit

Note we add libc6-i386 and python-webkit to resolve missing packages required for the next step.

Download the latest Eclipse CDT from their site. Uncompress and move to home.
$ tar xzf eclipse-cpp-luna-SR1a-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz
$ mv eclipse ~
$ cd ~
$ ./eclipse/eclipse

Follow the instructions from WPI to set up both the Java and the C environments. Verify this all works by building one of the sample Java and C projects.

Now follow the instructions for installing FRCSim. Note this installs an older version of eclipse and openjdk7. To ensure Oracle Java8 is still the default, execute:
$ sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-8-oracle

Start eclipse Luna (not the older version which was just installed).

Create the Java sample project for GearsBot and run the simulator. The first time it will fail so close the simulator, wait for everything to exit, then run the simulator again. The first time there are a lot of resources being created and a race condition causes failures.

Create the CPP sample project for the GearsBot and run the simulator. This will
fail to start the driver station because it can't find SimDS.jar.

Edit the file build.properties and change the wpilib.sim entry.
The old entry was: wpilib.sim=${wpilib}/sim
Change this to: wpilib.sim=${user.home}/wpilib/cpp/current/sim

Now the CPP sample should run in the simulator.

Hope this works for you and that the developers of this great resource keep improving it during the season! Can't wait to build our own bot in this simulator.