Installing Intellij’s IDEA on debian

Ok, so I wanted to continue thesis work on my desktop because the screen is larger and the keyboard is friendlier to my wrists. Problem is I’m running debian and it’s not the most java friendly linux distro I’ve ever used. I did get in running a lot easier than I thought though. Here is what I did.

Get the goods

I got the IBM SDK at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux140/ on the right hand navigation box is the download link. Fill out their giant form and then download IBMJava2-SDK-141.tgz.

Next get IDEA at http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ if you havn’t purchased it yet get the 30 day trial license while you’re there.

Set up ibm’s java

Unpack your SDK in /opt, if you choose to install in another directory make sure you reflect that in the environmental variable. In your .bash_profile add the following lines, if you want all users to have access to java then place these lines in /etc/profile.

export JAVA_HOME=/opt/IBMJava2-141
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin:$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin
export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$JAVA_HOME/lib

source .bash_profile for the changes to take effect.

Install IDEA as normal

Just run the installer as normal. I set all the project folders to be in my home directory and I set the install directory to be in /opt. When it asks for your JDK just point it at your JAVA_HOME.

Dats it.