Netbeans 7.0 on the EEEPC 900

As some of my readers may already know I use the EEEPC also as a highly portable development environment. Netbooks aren’t meant for heavy writing tasks like programming but having a handy development environment ready to experiment what you have just read on an e-book is a priceless feature for a programmer like me. (let me add that I doubt that e-readers or tablets will ever able to provide such feature). I so decided to upgrade Netbeans, Sun’s (now Oracle’s) development environment to the latest version (from 6.9 to 7.0).

Installation

Installing Netbeans is a quite simple task: I downloaded the self extracting script from Netbeans download page, made it executable:

chmod +x netbeans-7.0-ml-javase-linux.sh

and executed it as super user

sudo ./netbeans-7.0-ml-javase-linux.sh

Super user is only needed if you want install Netbeans in a path available to all users, you can execute the installation script normally and install Netbeans in your home folder.

As the installation application starts it welcomes you, as usual, with a couple of friendly license agreements

once agreed installation continued with asking installation and JDK paths

then the installation continued until completion.

First run

As I entered in Netbeans I’ve been shown a tool for importing plug-ins from older version. If you are interested in importing old plug-ins better you do it now. I closed the plug-in import window, since I wasn’t interested at the moment, and I haven’t been able to bring it back on. (the command line instructions at Oracle Blogs didn’t work for me)

After the plug-ins import Netbeans checked projects for references problems and displayed a simple tool to resolve project’s missing references.

Missing references have been then downloaded and, after some other license agreement, I’ve been able to run again my hello worlds

Conclusions

Not a lot more to say … Netbeans is a great, powerful and well designed piece of software. I don’t make an intensive use of Netbeans on the EEEPC, as I said I use it only to develop small experimental or demonstration programs when I study, but I like it especially for how its user interface can be adapted to the small EEEPC screen. I didn’t have time to test all latest version new features yet, I’ll do it later when (if) I’ll need them but, for now, I appreciated the easiness of the install process and the help given in solving little problems like missing references or plug-ins.