Netbeans 7.2 released, how to fix menu and dialog box issues on Ubuntu 12.04 Unity

I've been mainly using lightweight editors on Ubuntu for doing quick edits or bug fixes, however when working on large projects having code completion and a nice source code navigator really helps. So I heard from reddit that 7.2 is out and quickly gave it a try.

http://wiki.netbeans.org/NewAndNoteworthyNB72#PHP

First thing I've noticed after installing netbeans was that the menu colors were a bit off, actually its unreadable with the default ambiance theme, easy fix switched to radiance theme. Then came the dialog boxes, which is probably why you're here as well.

Discussion about this issue on the netbeans forum: http://forums.netbeans.org/ptopic30206.html

The FIX that worked for me is this, I downloaded Java SE Development Kit 6 Update 33 from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk6-downloads-1637591.html

chmod +x jdk-6u33-linux-x64.bin
./jdk-6u33-linux-x64.bin

It will extract the contents to a folder, move this to /usr/lib/jvm

sudo mv jdk1.6.0_33 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-oracle

Locate your netbeans installation folder, open up etc/netbeans.conf, locate the following line and change it to:

#netbeans_jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0"
netbeans_jdkhome="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-oracle"

That's it after that I was able to use netbeans on my secondary monitor and everything worked perfectly.

Also to fix the menu when using the ambiance theme I found this helpful post:

http://hanynowsky.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/netbeans-ide-look-feel-under-ubuntu-12-04/

Solution 1 worked

Go to your netbeans directory (ex: /home/user/netbeans7.2/etc) and open the file : netbeans.conf
then add the following line to netbeans options:
-J-Dswing.aatext=true -J-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd --laf Metal