bobpeers -> blog

I’ve been playing around with ASP.NET for a few weeks now which has of course meant using Windows much more than I’m used to (apart form at work that is). One area I have to admit that Microsoft excels in is Programming IDEs. I downloaded the free (as in beer) Visual Web Developer Express Edition and even on my old slow laptop it’s very responsive and enjoyable to use.

The same is true of the Visual C++ Express Edition. Compared to either Anjuta or especially Netbeans it’s incredibly fast to run. Start up takes just a few seconds and code completion is almost instantaneous whereas using Netbeans there’s a noticeable delay before the list appears.

I understand that Microsoft only makes tools for Windows so they can optimise them for that environment whereas Netbeans runs on nearly any platform but it makes me wish that there was an Open Source IDE that can compete with Microsoft only tool when it comes to performance.

It’s not an IDE but the best known example of this is Microsoft Office compared to Open Office running on the same hardware. It probably takes 30 second to start OO on my laptop and about 2 seconds using MS Office. Even once running, just dragging the mouse over a few cells in a spreadsheet in OO to select them produces a lag.

I actually compared OO Calc to Google Docs and I think it’s more responsive running in a browser.

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my Sun Java JDK install, it was at version 1.6.0_06 but I’ve now installed 1.6.0_10.

As a side note also this shows how lazy I get with Linux when you are used to having all your software upgraded automatically. In this case I have to install the Java JDK myself so like most users I’m not that good at updating software, especially when it’s not something I can see, unlike Firefox or some other GUI application.

There are many pros and cons of the Linux vs the Windows way of installing software but there’s no denying that updating software centrally keeps the user far more up to date, and so secure, with no effort at all on the users part. Ironically this is probably something Windows users need more than Linux users.

Anyway, back to the point. After upgrading I ran the usual /usr/sbin/alternatives command to use the new install as my default Java. But after checking some applications that depend on Java I discovered that Netbeans would not start due to the following error:

$ /opt/netbeans-6.1/bin/netbeans
Cannot find java. Please use the --jdkhome switch.

Sure enough providing the new JDK location successfully started Netbeans.

$ /opt/netbeans-6.1/bin/netbeans --jdkhome /opt/jdk1.6.0_10/

This was fine but I wanted the change to be permanent but couldn’t find a config file in my $HOME/.netbeans directory. It turns out the file is located at /netbeans-install-directory/etc/netbeans.conf, in my case /opt/netbeans-6.1/etc/netbeans.conf

Edit the following line as root and save the file to make your change permanent

# Default location of JDK, can be overridden by using --jdkhome <dir>:
netbeans_jdkhome="/opt/jdk1.6.0_10"