Thanks BC. I'll let you know how it goes. I have to sleep now so I can get up for my 7:30 class.
Are all compilers mostly the same when it comes to layout and use, so it wont be to hard to figure out what I need to do if it is different then what my instructor gave me?
erm...
an "IDE" is what you use to write the code... the compiler is almost always a small command line program that the IDE calls. For example; Visual Basic 6 uses the C++ compiler (yeah, strange, I know); the java compiler is usually called "javac".
Personally I've never used Eclipse... I've always used netbeans. Not sure if that's on Linux though.
Either way, they will probably have different ways of doing things. but that's not the point; I would hope the class is about java and not the Development environment.
If you compile class files on your machine they should work perfectly fine on any other machine; compiled java is an intermediate bytecode, not machine code, so it's more generic. (this is what the java VM is for)