TBNL

This morning I upgraded my Ubuntu machine using the auto-update. As I just recently started using Ubuntu I’m very pleased at how some features work compared to Vista. (Vista users will probably be familiar with the auto-update restart that has a terrific feel for timing by always presenting you the choice for postponing the restart when you have several documents opened and are away for a coffee break.) After my self initiated restart everything worked like a charm, OpenOffice is updated to version 3 (nice for the docx workflow) but… Netbeans didn’t start. Now that’s bad for productivity. Running from the console showed the following:

Cannot find java. Please use the --jdkhome switch.

a After a little bit of googling I learned there is a netbeans.conf somewhere. On my system it’s location is:

~/netbeans-6.7-m2/etc/netbeans.conf

In there, look for a line like

netbeans_jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.13/jre"

and change the version number to the correct version. For me it worked like a charm, I hope it helps someone.

Last night there was a phpGG (dutch php user group) meeting in Utrecht with a presentation by Lorna Jane titled ‘Linux-Fu’. Attended by about 10 people, console basics & tricks were addressed. I’m not unfamiliar with Linux so the basics weren’t that new. For development I mainly use IDE’s so I just use the console to edit the occasional config file, create some symlinks, that kind of stuff. For those tasks I find myself sticking to set of commands I’ve learned and just occasionally taking the time to do an in-depth google search for better ways to get the job done. So with regard to linux shell trickery there are things to learn for me. Neat timesavers:

Switching between current and previous directory:

cd -

Going home can be done without the ~:

cd

How ‘grep’ can beat your IDE. I’ve been playing around a bit and this is really a quick way of finding all classes within a directory that implement an interface (and it’s fast!):

grep -i -r 'class ' . | grep implements

And there’s ’screen’. Very useful for handling multiple terminal sessions without the risk of losing them all due to a connection hick-up. Lorna has some config examples on her site.

So not all was new but there were definitely some nice starting points to investigate further.