Install NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 (Ruby on Rails version) on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

I’ve been reading good things about the newest versions of NetBeans as an IDE for Ruby on Rails development. I decided to try it out and see if it worked well for me. the current NetBeans packages in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) are version 5.5. So to try out the new version I had to download it and install it manually.

The first thing I noted was that NetBeans requires a Java JDK to be installed. NetBeans is developed to run on Sun’s Java and I decided that at this point I would just use that rather than trying to see if another Java implementation would work. So I started with:

• sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Then I downloaded the “Ruby” pack of Netbeands IDE 6.0 Beta 2 from here:

• http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.0/beta2/ (javascript must be enabled)

This downloads a 19MB file named netbeans-6.0beta2-ruby-linux.sh. Once downloaded I opened a terminal to the download directory and ran:

• sudo sh netbeans-6.0beta2-ruby-linux.sh
  • I read through and accepted the terms of the license agreement
  • I noted that the software would be installed to /usr/local/netbeans-6.0beta2 and that it correctly identified the JDK in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
  • I was then informed that the “Total Installation Size” would be 73.6MB and prompted to click the “Install” button which I did.
  • The installation went smoothly and the final dialog notified me that the setup was complete and the installation was successful.

To simplify the process of launching the program from the command line I did th following:

• cd /usr/local/bin
• sudo ln -s /usr/local/netbeans-6.0beta2/bin/netbeans

NetBeans has some issues with the gems installed on the system. The first issue is that it cannot find the gems without setting the GEMHOME environmental variable. I chose to set this in my ~/.bashprofile as follows:

• nano ~/.bash_profile
• add the line export GEM_HOME=/var/lib/gems/1.8

The second issue is that users do not have rights to add, remove, and modify gems. NetBeans doesn’t seem to support using sudo to gain rights but I found it was relatively easy and safe to simply change the permissions like this:

• sudo chown -R root:adm /var/lib/gems
• sudo chmod -R g+rw /var/lib/gems

These commands change the group ownership of the directory (and all files and directories descended from it) to adm (of which my user account is a member) and gives that group write permissions to the directory (and all files and directories descended from it). Following those changes the “Tools - Ruby Gems” functionality seemed to work fine. Now I just have to spend some time evaluating the IDE itself.