Comment 4 for bug 398280

Unfortunately I don't have time to do more thorough research, but I'll write my experiences here in case they help someone.

I had problems with frequent NetBeans crashes. It sometimes happened with refactoring, bookmarks or other "advanced" editor features, but most often it happend with form designer. It wasn't deterministic, ie. loading project after crash and doing it again would usually not crash again. And I sure learned to automatically do "save all" after every form change, after losing a bit of work a few times...

This happened with Jaunty's NetBeans 6.5, manually installed NetBeans 6.7.1 and now with Karmic's NetBeans 6.7.1 too, and this week it got so frequent that I had to do something about it (note: more frequent crashing was probably because of growing code size and complexity, not because of Jauntu -> Karmic update).

I solved the problem by removing openjdk-6 packages (not probably necessary) and using sun-java6. Not a single crash after that. I'm sorry I can't provide any technical information about the crashes, but it was so frequent that just doing some complex form design stuff with netbeans should trigger it.

Note: to get netbeans to use sun-java6 I had to manually edit /etc/netbeans.conf:
- netbeans_jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk"
+ netbeans_jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"
I don't know if there's a way to do that automatically, but I think dpkg-reconfigure netbeans should maybe do it, if sun's jdk is installed and openjdk is not.