I recently updated Netbeans, installed on the EEEPC 900, to the latest released version. I first downloaded it from Netbeans download page. I usually prefer to download the base version, since I don’t know preventively what I’m going to experiment and which plug-ins I’m going to need.
Installing Netbeans has been so only matter of executing the downloaded file
chmod +x netbeans-6.8-ml-javase-linux.sh
sudo ./netbeans-6.8-ml-javase-linux.sh
the installation then started and, after agreeing with the usual license, I selected the installation path and the SDK to be used.