After a recent upgrade I discovered that spell checking had stopped working in Eclipse. The spelling configuration in preferences only displayed the less than helpful message ‘The spelling service is not installed’. I looked around for a missing Eclipse plug-in or something not installed in Linux but couldn’t find anything helpful. Finally I found a bug report that shed some light on the problem. Turns out the spell checking functionality is bundled with the JDT. When I upgraded I installed the new Eclipse for PHP Developers package which doesn’t include JDT and hence no spell checking. Installing JDT in Eclipse fixed the problem, but a more helpful message in the spelling preferences would have saved me a lot of time.