I am still not sure why I could not get Netbeans 5.5 to run properly with Gentoo Linux, except as root. This is the Netbeans 5.5 binary installer downloaded from Sun. I did figure out a workaround though. I just created a group called javasun and put all my regular accounts into that group.
It seems to work so far… I’ll have to see what happens when I start writting code.
8-Dale