Chapter 2

How to Install IntelliJ IDEA on Ubuntu

Linux
Some years ago, Eclipse was probably the king of the IDEs of Java development. But, in the last times,
IntelliJ IDEA, from
JetBrains (developers of WebStorm, PhpStorm or TeamCity, among many other IDEs and software
engineering tools), has
become very popular, being considered by many developers the best Java IDE nowadays. This tutorial
will show how to install
it on Linux.
For this tutorial, Linux Mint 18 (an Ubuntu based Linux distribution) and IntelliJ IDEA 2016.2.5 have
been used.

2.1 Download
We can download IntelliJ IDEA from the official JetBrains site. As you can see, JetBrains offers two
editions: Community
Edition, free and open source (GitHub repository); and Ultimate Edition, proprietary and non-free (check
prices).
In this tutorial, we will use the Community Edition. You can follow the direct download link.
After the download, we should verify the file checksum, to check that the download has been made
correctly and that the file is
not corrupted. In this case, for the 2016.2.5 version, the SHA-256 checksum is the following:
1bccc6689c5a140cc8e3b6496a07c7c7c2d2b403034aaff98ace0c9badd63734
(Got from IntelliJ IDEA).
For checking the checksum of the file we just have downloaded, we have to open the terminal, navigate to
the directory of the
download, and execute the sha256sum command:
cd path/to/download
sha256sum ideaIC-2016.2.5.tar.gz
In this case, we got the same checksum, so we can proceed with the installation. If we would have got a
distinct checksum, we
would have to download it again.

2.2 Installation
Of course, the first step is to extract the downloaded compressed file:
tar -zxvf ideaIC-2016.2.5.tar.gz
Now, we have to execute the installation script (idea.sh) inside the bin/ directory of the directory where
the files have been
extracted. So, before, we have to give execution permissions to the script: