If you have untarred your own version of tomcat v8 with a root user into a custom directory (linux) then the default permissions on the TOMCATROOT/lib directory do not allow normal user access.
Eclipse will not be able to see the catalina.jar to check the version. So no amount of fiddling aorund with the server.properties will help!
just add chmod u+x lib/ to allow normal user access to the libs.