To provide some assurance that NetBeans can indeed work on Debian, I just (today) started running NetBeans on Debian using Blackdown's J2SE 1.4.1 (beta) package, and it works well.
Have you tried setting JAVA_HOME to the appropriate value? -- John R. Daily <email><mailbox>john</mailbox><domain>geekhavoc.com</domain></email>
