NetBeans 8.1 under Solaris

If you are up to GCC under Solaris you may eventually get tempted to try a GUI development environment a.k.a Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The only major player that works on Solaris is NetBeans, but even if it weren't the only one, it would certainly be amongst the best ones. In fact, the only other major IDE that compete with NetBeans on other platforms is Eclipse, but NetBeans seems to have an edge in terms of software flexibility and openness.

The platform independent installation option of NetBeans is extremely simple to deal with. Basically, just download it and extract it to /opt. The extraction process may be tied to a subdirectory named netbeans, so that if you intend to keep multiple versions of side by side, this would probably be a problem. To workaround this lack of flexibility in the delivery method I suggest that you append version suffixes to the directory name, such as -81. Then, before setting to the extraction process, make sure you have a symbolic link from netbeans to netbeans-81.
 
NOTE

I'm completely ignoring here any slightly more sophisticated ZFS approach to dedicate a dataset under rpool/VARSHARE to be mounted under or linked at /opt. The one before the last sentence of the 1^st § and the 1^st sentence of the 2^nd § of an example of a more elaborate file-system setup can shed some light on what I mean by "a slightly more sophisticated file-system approach".

$ zfs list -o name,mountpoint .../netbeans-81
NAME              MOUNTPOINT
.../netbeans-81   /opt/netbeans-81
 
Please, note that rpool/VARSHARE/netbeans-81 was used above just as an example. It's not the recommended dataset to do so. In general, there should be one or more dedicated datasets to hold /opt subdirectories.

That is:

# cd /opt
# ln -s netbeans-81 netbeans
# unzip -q /tmp/netbeans-8.1-201510222201-cpp.zip
# rm netbeans

$ ls -lhtr /opt/netbeans-81/
total 670
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... THIRDPARTYLICENSE.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... README.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... netbeans.css
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... LICENSE.txt
-rw-r--r--  1 root root ... CREDITS.html
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root ... nb
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root ... etc
drwxr-xr-x 11 root root ... harness
drwxr-xr-x  9 root root ... ide
drwxr-xr-x  9 root root ... platform
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root ... cnd
drwxr-xr-x  7 root root ... dlight
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root ... bin

Perform the first run as root but before that set up properly the X11 authorization and the DISPLAY environment variable as described in this other post X11 & SSH & SU. Launch NetBeans by executing and the file /opt/netbeans-81/bin/netbeans, accept the terms of the agreement and then exit at your own discretion. At this point you're pretty much done.

I would recommend to setup the default project folder, otherwise one will get a ~/NetBeansProjects which may be less than ideal. To address this, after a first launch, look for the projectui.properties file in ~/.netbeans and edit the value of projectsFolder entry (and any other eventual ocurrences of the unwanted path):

$ find ~/.netbeans -name projectui.properties

One final detail you may like to set up is a GNOME launcher under the menu Application | Developer Tools. In addition to referencing /opt/netbeans-81/bin/netbeans you'll probably reference the nice icon located at /opt/netbeans-81/nb/netbeans.png :