One of the things that stopped working as it should after my recent Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade was the Eclipse PDT installation that I had in place. Editing files went a bit haywire and creating projects had me pushing buttons with nothing happening. Whether this was a Java or GNOME issue, I don’t know but I found it happening too on openSUSE 11.2 (there should be more on that distro in a later entry). That was enough to get me looking again at Netbeans.
In both openSUSE (NB version 6.5) and Ubuntu (NB version 6.7.1), I plucked the default offering of Netbeans from the respective software repositories and added the PHP plugin in both cases. Unlike when I last gave the platform a go, things seemed to go smoothly and it looks to have replaced Eclipse for PHP development duties. Project scanning make take a little while but it’s far from annoying and my earlier dalliance with using Netbeans as a PHP editor was stymied by performance that was so sluggish as to make the thing a pain to use. Up to now, Netbeans’ footprints when it comes to its use of PC power never was light so I am wondering if dual-core and quad-core CPU’s help along with a copious supply of RAM. Only time will tell if these inital positive impressions stay the course and I’ll be keeping an open mind for now.
Just to let you know the trick to make the buttons work in Ubuntu 9.10:
start eclipse with a script in which you set the GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS variable. It’s explained in french there: http://blog.developpez.com/ddelbecq/p8288/java/solution-les-boutons-d-eclipse-ne-foncti-10/
#!/bin/sh
#Fix issue with eclipse buttons
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
eclipse
Nevertheless, it was a good time to move to Netbeans, great IDE too ;)
Thanks Francois. I just might have a go with that to see what happens.