Install Intellij Idea in Ubuntu

Background

Whichever IDE you use installing it is very easy in Ubuntu. In this post I will show how can we configure Intellij IDEA. Installing Eclipse is also similar. You can see short summary of it in 

• Things to do after installing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Downloading and Installing

1. Download latest Intellij IDEA from their official site. For me its 'ideaIC-14.0.1.tar.gz'.
2. Extract the compressed archive to some suitable folder. I will install it in a folder called firefox in my user directory -
   
   aniket@aniket-Compaq-610:~$ cd firefox/
   aniket@aniket-Compaq-610:~/firefox$ tar xzvf ideaIC-14.0.1.tar.gz
3. That's pretty much it for downloading and installing part. You can run the IDE by executing idea.sh script file inside the bin folder.
   
   aniket@aniket-Compaq-610:~/firefox$ cd idea-IC-139.225.3/
   aniket@aniket-Compaq-610:~/firefox/idea-IC-139.225.3$ ./bin/idea.sh

Creating launcher for your application

Procedure is same for creating launcher for your executable. I will demonstrate it for IDEA.

aniket@aniket-Compaq-610:~$ cd /usr/share/application/
aniket@aniket-Compaq-610:/usr/share/applications$ sudo gedit idea.desktop

Now add the following lines to it

[Desktop Entry]
Name=IntelliJ IDEA
Comment=IntelliJ IDEA IDE
Exec=/home/aniket/firefox/idea-IC-139.225.3/bin/idea.sh
Icon=/home/aniket/firefox/idea-IC-139.225.3/bin/idea.png
Terminal=false
StartupNotify=true
Type=Application
Categories=Development;IDE;

Above configuration is with respect to my executable path. Change the enteries accordingly. Save the file and run it to launch the application.

Note : Did you notice we put out idea.desktop in '/usr/share/applications' folder. By doing this it will also be accessible from unity search dashboard.

If you remember we had done similar thing for Eclipse. We downloaded the archive file and then created the launcher.

Related Links

• Download IntelliJ IDEA 14
• Things to do after installing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS