From Eclipsepedia

Buckminster is available in two distribution formats:

• An Eclipse Update site
• As an Eclipse Product

Buckminster Packaged as an Eclipse Update site

This is obviously the main format: a set of features where each in turn consists of one or many plugins. It is convenient to use; all you need to do is point the Update Manager to the site and select the features you wish to install. However, to use it fully you need to have the Eclipse IDE already installed, and not be overly concerned with disk space requirements for example.

The Buckminster features/plugins have been carefully designed to avoid dependencies on UI packages when not required so as to be possible to use even in environments where it's not possible to use a graphical UI. In such situations it may make more sense to use the product build.

Please visit our download page.

Buckminster Packaged as an Eclipse Product

This format is for specialized situations; it is called the 'product' format as it is built using the Eclipse Product packaging paradigm. Beyond the fact that is intended as a standalone package, you can view it as a subset of the functionality gained through the update site. Specifically, it is intended to be used in Headless mode situations only (though given it's design it can serve as a foundation for achieveing a graphical startup as well). It only contains the bare essentials to begin with, so before it can be used for anything useful, it needs to be customized by you. The benefit is that you can be very selective on what it contains, and thus bring down the footprint. Actually, it is likely you may wish to use install further Buckminster features from the Buckminster update site.

Product builds are available as zip archives available on our download page.

Note that Buckminster has many possible extension points. This is also true for the Headless framework. In fact, it is entirely possible to use only this framework and produce your very own headless application which has nothing to do with what Buckminster otherwise can do. More on extending the Headless framework here.