Today, I wanted to do some profiling of a Java application in Eclipse (3.4 aka Ganymede) on my Ubuntu 8.10 box at work. Google pointed me to the Eclipse TPTP (Test & Performance Tools) platform, which I installed through the Eclipse plug-in installer thingy, that weird acting constantly blocking/reloading user interface located under the "help" menu (of all places!), but lets not get us carried away by that for the moment.
After installation (and the obligatory eclipse restart), I tried to use the new tool, but soon my enthusiasm was curbed as I got a nice red error message IWAT0435E An error occurred when connecting to the host on the monitor tab of the profile configuration dialog. No profiling for me, sir. Bummer.
Getting ready for what started to smell like another jumping through hoops session, I googled the warning and got to this eclipse bug report. Apparently, some component of TPTP requires a prehistoric version of libstdc++. Unfortunately, that version was not available anymore in the standard Ubuntu repositories since Ubuntu 8.04 or something.