See Installing Oracle Java and Netbeans on Ubuntu for an up to date version of this article.
I'm always picking up different tools and weighing them against my current method of doing things. As a web developer my integrated development environment (IDE) is a critical piece of my day. Traditionally, I've used Eclipse but over the last few months I've moved to Netbeans. From a performance and usability standpoint it just feels a bit snappier and the language integration seems just a little tighter. It has great native support for PHP, Ruby on Rails and I've even heard talk of a CakePHP plugin so most of my day to day stuff is covered.
While the Netbeans install is fairly straight forward, installing the Sun Java6 JDK on Ubuntu 10.4 isn't so well documented. So I thought I would take a few minutes and share the installation process that works best for me.
First, we'll open a terminal and use apt-get for the Java install. We'll start by updating the repository.
sudo add-apt-repository "deb <a href="http://archive.canonical.com/">http://archive.canonical.com/</a> lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
Second, we'll install the Sun Java6 JDK by calling the sun-java6-jdk package. Use tab and the space bar to accept the prompts.
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Next, we'll need to grab the Netbeans package. We'll use wget to do this.
wget <a href="http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.9.1/final/bundles/netbeans-6.9.1-ml-linux.sh">http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.9.1/final/bundles/netbeans-6.9.1-ml-linux.sh</a>
Finally, we'll install Netbeans. Let's start by making the install file executable, then run the install script.
chmod +x netbeans-6.9.1-ml-linux.sh
./netbeans-6.9.1-ml-linux.sh