If you’re going to be developing applications based on Java and you need a great development platform to manage your codes, NetBeans might be a great please to start…

This brief tutorial is going to show students and new users how to easily install NetBeans IDE on Ubuntu 16.04 / 17.10 / 18.04 desktop… This post can also be applied to previous and future releases of Ubuntu.

For those who don’t know about NetBeans, it’s an open source code editor based on Java that enables anyone to develop applications for desktop, mobile, web in Java, PHP, C/C++, XML, HTML, JavaScript and many other platforms.

The layout is great, the features are many and it should allow developers to create great applications with ease.

For more about NetBeans, please check this link.

Since NetBeans is based on Java and requires Java in order to function, you must first install Java JDK 8 on Ubuntu…. NetBeans doesn’t fully support JDK 9… so you must install version 8 instead… To install Oracle JAVA JDK 8 on Ubuntu, follow the steps below…

Step 1: Install Oracle Java JDK 8

The easiest way to install Oracle Java JDK 8 on Ubuntu is via a third party PPA… To add that PPA, run the commands below

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

After running the commands above, you should see a prompt to accept the PPA key onto Ubuntu… accept and continue

Now that the PPA repository has been added to Ubuntu, run the commands below to download Oracle Java 9 installer…. the installer should install the latest Java JDK 9 on your Ubuntu machines.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install oracle-java8-installer

When you run the commands above you’ll be prompted to access the license terms of the software… accept and continue..

Set Oracle JDK8 as default, to do that, install the oracle-java8-set-default package. This will automatically set the JAVA env variable.

sudo apt install oracle-java8-set-default

The command above will automatically set Java 9 as the default… and that should complete your installation, you can check you java version by running following command.

javac -version

Step 2: Downloading NetBeans

After installing Java JDK to your system, run the commands below to download NetBeans 8.2…

cd /tmp && wget -c http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/8.2/final/bundles/netbeans-8.2-linux.sh

Wait until the complete package is downloaded to your machine… it should download to the /tmp directory…

Step 3: Install NetBeans

After downloading the installer package, while still in the /tmp directory, run the commands below to install.

chmod +x netbeans-8.2-linux.sh 
sudo ./netbeans-8.2-linux.sh

After running the commands above, run the commands below to begin the installation.

You should then see NetBeans installation wizard started. The default choices should be just fine. You don’t have to customize too much. However, if you know what you’re doing, you can customize all you want.

Follow the wizard until you’re done.

Select the default installation directory to install NetBeans

Then NetBeans installation should continue. If the installer can’t find where Java JDK is installed, you will have to browse to find it. The default location on Ubuntu is stored at /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle

Continue and click Install to finish the installation.

After installing, launch the application and begin building great applications.

Enjoy!

Summary:

This post shows you how to install NetBeans on Ubuntu systems. NetBeans IDE is a great application that allows to to build great applications.

You must have Java installed in order to have NetBeans running. The post shows you how to also install Open Java JDK/JRE

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Upgrading Ubuntu 16.04 Desktop to 18.04