The Linux Experiment

If you’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 and are a developer you may notice some things missing. For one there is no longer an option to install the sun-java6-jdk or JRE from the repositories. Worse they also removed the Netbeans IDE. Apparently this had something to do with licenses but if you’re going to offer MP3 support the least you could do is make software like this available for those who are willing to look for it.

Anyway with that rant out of the way I did manage to find a way to install both.

Install sun-java6-jdk

Following the instructions on this excellent post I was able to successfully install sun-java6-jdk using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

There are alternative instructions for installing Java 7 as well.

Install Netbeans

My first attempt at installing both was to head to the official Oracle Java website and download the Netbeans + JDK installer. Unfortunately the installer seems to crash in this version of Ubuntu. However since the above process had installed the JRE I was able to simply grab the Netbeans only installer from Oracle which ended up working surprisingly well. Just remember to run it using sudo if you want other users to be able to use it as well.

So you want to do Android development but you hate Eclipse? Well fear not, there is another IDE that you can use to meet your mobile development needs. This is a quick guide, mostly for my reference later, on how to setup an Android development environment in Netbeans.

1. Download and install the Android SDK and Netbeans IDE like normal

Pretty self-explanatory just grab the installers from here and here respectively.

2. Download and install the Android plugin for Netbeans

The plugin to use is nbandroid and the easiest way to get it is to download it from right within Netbeans. First add the update xml (http://kenai.com/projects/nbandroid/downloads/download/updatecenter/updates.xml) to Netbeans.

Then simply install the plugin from the refreshed list of available ones.

3. Create an Android project

Just like you would create any other project in Netbeans. This will prompt you that you need to set up the location of the SDK. This can be done through the Manage Android SDK button.

Once created the project should be more or less good to go. Don’t worry if you get an error about a missing file R.java, this file will be automatically generated for your when you build the project the first time.

4. Profit?

That’s pretty much it. Now when you click run it will build and deploy your application to the emulator just like it does in regular old Eclipse.

Originally posted on my personal website here.