[eclipse] Maven plugin in Eclipse - Settings.xml file is missing

I installed the maven plugin for eclipse. Then tried updating the index and got the following error:

Unable to update index for central|http://repo1.maven.org/maven2

While trying to edit the proxy settings through windows-preferences-maven-user settings, I realise there is no such file. I don't have separate maven installation and only the plugin. Please someone could help resolving the problem? Thank you very much.

Cheers A

Config: Helios Service Release 1 org.maven.ide.eclipse.feature (0.12.0.20101115-1102) "Maven Integration for Eclipse"

The settings file is never created automatically, you must create it yourself, whether you use embedded or "real" maven.

Create it at the following location <your home folder>/.m2/settings.xml e.g. C:\Users\YourUserName\.m2\settings.xml on Windows or /home/YourUserName/.m2/settings.xml on Linux

Here's an empty skeleton you can use:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0
                      http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
  <localRepository/>
  <interactiveMode/>
  <usePluginRegistry/>
  <offline/>
  <pluginGroups/>
  <servers/>
  <mirrors/>
  <proxies/>
  <profiles/>
  <activeProfiles/>
</settings>

If you use Eclipse to edit it, it will give you auto-completion when editing it.

And here's the Maven settings.xml Reference page

Working on Mac I followed the answer of Sean Patrick Floyd placing a settings.xml like above in my user folder /Users/user/.m2/

But this did not help. So I opened a Terminal and did a ls -la on the folder. This was showing

-rw-r--r--@

thus staff and everone can at least read the file. So I wondered if the message isn't wrong and if the real cause is the lack of write permissions. I set the file to:

-rw-r--rw-@

This did it. The message disappeared.