NetBeans is my favourite IDE for java development. I’ve been using NetBeans from version 4.1 onwards and I can’t believe that it has progressed and transformed itself so well. Right from version 5.0 onwards, NetBeans has been making amazing strides in terms of developer adoption. And the recent 6.5 release is really fantastic. It’s fast, it’s responsive and got many new cool features. Though I use NetBeans at office which runs on Windows XP, I haven’t tried that yet on my Ubuntu-8.10. So, I thought it’s time to give it a go.
Installing NetBeans in Ubuntu in very easy. The only pre-requisite for installation is to have a suitable JDK on your machine. That too is not a problem if you download the NetBeans + JDK bundle. But I thought of installing them separately. By default, Ubuntu-8.10 doesn’t come with JDK pre-installed, so you have to install it manually. Installing JDK in Ubuntu is just a matter of issuing a “one line” command. Just open your terminal and type:
“sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk”
or, if you are a person who prefer GUI more than command line, open your Synaptic Package Manager and look for “sun-java6-jdk” and install it. What surprised me though was the availability of the latest JDK, i.e, “JDK 6 Update 10″. Installing JDK had never been so easy.
(Note: I’m not sure whether sun’s jdk is available in the default Ubuntu repositories. You may have to enable universe/multiverse repositories if you don’t find the package “sun-java6-jdk”)
TIP: To ensure faster download of JDK, configure the fastest mirror near your location. To do that, open “System -> Administration -> Software Sources” and look for a drop down box called “Download from”.
The installation process of JDK will ask you to accept a license agreement. Once you agree it, JDK will be installed in your system. I’ve installed JDK 5 previously in old versions of Ubuntu but I had to change some files to configure the default JDK. But this time, I did nothing and after installing the JDK, I went to the terminal and typed “java -version” and found everything to be setup correctly.
I thought of installing NetBeans 6.5 also the same way, but I found only NetBeans 6.1 in Synaptic. So, I decided to download NetBeans 6.5. After downloading, I opened the terminal, navigated to the download directory and issued the command “sh netbeans-6.5-ml-javase-linux.sh” to initiate the install process. Kindly note that “netbeans-6.5-ml-javase-linux.sh” is the name of the file I downloaded. This might change depending on the version/pack you downloaded.
And within a couple of minutes, NetBeans was ready for use on my machine. And this is how it looked, when I opened it.
Pro tip: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AptUrl
On my machine netbeans is incredibly slow with the gtk look and feel. It takes e.g. way too long for the menus to open up. Using the ugly ocean look and feel makes it quite a bit faster. It’s sad to see that netbeans looks and feels best on windows. Since JDK 6 Update 10 it looks very much like a native app and reacts very quickly. How do you feel about netbeans performance on linux?
Hi Stefan,
I still use NetBeans on windows for my work. I haven’t done any serious development with NetBeans on linux yet. However, I’m looking forward to do more development with NetBeans on linux. Did you try the Nimbus look and feel?
hi,
Thanks for the post.
This helped me on time.
I’ve just installed, I’ll check with the slowness…
In reply to Stefan: I’ve found that Netbeans 6.5 performs much better on my Debian system than Netbeans 6.1 (that’s packaged with Debian). And it doesn’t look too bad (for me) either: http://timony.com/mickzblog/2008/12/03/netbeans-65-on-debian/ . It is a bit slow at startup, and does seems to bog down from time-to-time, but overall I don’t think the performance is bad (or at least the feature-set is good enough that they out-weight any slow-downs).
I don’t have a 1.6 JVM on Windows to compare the performance of Netbeans on WinXP vs Linux (the install of 1.6 on WinXP I have seems to be borked for some reason)>
Did you have issues accessing cvs with netbeans. I seem to get sporadic issues with cvs. Sometimes I get update failed. Command failed. Did anyone come across this? When I browse through the cvs branches, it does not display all the existing branches. Each time it displays a few different existing branches. Please reply
Hi,
I installed Netbeans on Ubuntu 8.10 and have been using both for some months now. It’s excellent to have such a good IDE for PHP development, but I do get frustrated when it starts being slow. Does anyone know how to fix this? I’ve even removed most of the additional plugins i’d installed and the performance improved a tit-bit.
Regards,
Me.
I use ht same thing, now i want uninstall it but I dont knowa how to do it?
Hi;
is in /usr/local/netbeans-6.5/uninstall.sh
i found the uninstall file
i will have a good dream :p
Hi Sunitha,
I’m sorry that I couldn’t help you in this regard.
I use subversion and never came across any issues so far.