Netbeans 6.0, Leopard and “fast debug”

Netbeans 6.0, Leopard and “fast debug”

January 7, 2008 in Engineering, Note to self, ruby, Tricks

For the new year, I upgraded to a new machine which includes MacOS Leopard. The system looks o.k., a few nice features and not much changed really. However, there are also some annoyances:

Leopard includes a Rails distribution, but to move up to 2.0 you should do

gem update --system
gem update

to get the newest version of everything. Gem works out of the box, but uses a slightly unusual directory layout. Which means that Netbeans 6.0 will not enable the “Fast Debugger” (which is ruby-debug) – even if you installed ruby-debug-(ide|base|}-* and all the rest. The solution is a bit hidden on the NetBeans pages:

Add the following to /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 6.0.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans

export GEM_PATH=/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8:/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8
export GEM_HOME=/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8

This will set the environment variables that NetBeans needs to find the Gems – after the next scan it will re-scan the gem directories, and you can start using the debugger…

Tags: , , , ,

6 Comments › Leave yours

  1. Hans #

    How exactly should I edit that …./MacOS/netbeans file. I’m a newbi to mac….

    Thanx in advance.

  2. daniel #

    Ah come on… “Show Package Content” from the Finder context menu. Or use the terminal.

  3. Hans #

    Well yes, I got that.

    But actually editing that file. When I open it and save it using Textedit, netbeans won’t start. Should I edit it with some other editor? And does it matter where in that document I put the extra instructions.

    Thanx a lot.

    H

  4. daniel #

    I have no idea, maybe a problem with Textedit (the file is a symlink, and it’s officially write-protected); maybe you should edit the “original” file (in Resources/NetBeans/bin/netbeans) instead of the link. That said, I was using TextMate and it did fine. The instructions have to go above the last block of instructions – the one starting with case “`uname`” in. This is the part starting NetBeans, so it doesn’t make sense at the end.

  5. Hans #

    Great, the position of the instructions did it. Thanx 4 ur patience!

  6. baryon #

    cd /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans\ 6.1.app/Contents/MacOS/
    sudo ./netbeans

    then install fast debugger

Leave a Reply