Installing a new JRE in Eclipse

Question

Upon installing a new JRE in Eclipse 4.3 (on Mac OS X 10.8.4), I am given the following options:

• Execution Environment Description
• MacOS X VM
• Standard 1.1.x VM
• Standard VM

What's the difference between the final three options?

Answer 1

You have to choose Standard VM for a vanilla JRE or JDK.

MacOS X VM refers to the apple implementation that is bundled with OS X until now, Standard 1.1.x VM is a compatibility for legacy Java 1.1 and Standard VM is for Standard JRE from Sun/Oracle (Vanilla) .

Answer 2

From Eclipse documentation:

Standard VM - You will select a folder where the JRE is installed. The details of the JRE will be determined by scanning the location. You can further customize the JRE install, specifying vm arguments, source attachments, etc.

Standard VM 1.x.x - Same options as a standard VM install, but the install is customized to handle the 1.x.x install

Basically, the options here let you choose the JVM implementation. Standard 1.1.x refers to compatibility with Java 1.1. MacOS X VM here refers to Apple's implementation.