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I finally decided it was about time I upgraded the Netbeans and jdk installations on my netbook. So I downloaded the current versions of each (jdk-6u16-linux-i586.bin & netbeans-6.7.1-ml-linux.sh). Later, offline, I ran the uninstall script for the existing (6.5) copy and did a "rm -fr" on the JDK (1.6.0_07) directory, cd'd to /usr/local/share and ran the two installers with sudo. Everything ran through without error, I now have shiny new /usr/local/share/jdk1.6.0_16 and /usr/local/share/netbeans-6.7.1 directories and the netbeans.conf has correctly picked up the jdk home. java -version works okay and displays the expected string, and Netbeans ran okay from the xfce menu (naturally, under my ordinary user account rather than su'd) and displayed the welcome screen; I told it not to import the existing settings so it was starting from a clean user directory. However, the menus are incredibly bare. Figuring this was due to a lack of enabled Features, I opened up the Plugins manager intending to enable the various ones I normally use (for starters, java se, web & ee). And indeed, the Installed plugins tab shows that currently only the "Base IDE" and "User Installed Plugins" features are enabled. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear possible to enable any of the other features - the other entries are all greyed out, the Select checkbox won't tick, and when I right-click on them the Activate & Deactivate options are both disabled (on all the entries, including the two enabled ones). Okay, I know that features will be enabled when the relevant project types are created/used, but I want to do them in advance. Eventually, I discovered that if I clicked the "Show details" checkbox at the top, when I then right-click one of the disabled modules (e.g. the Java module) there's an option to Activate Category "...". But this is far from intuitive. Also, how come I can Select one or more modules from an Activated category and Deactivate it, but cannot Select a module from an inactive category and Activate it? That seems inconsistent. Lastly, when I selected to activate the categories through this method, I was presented with a dialog that confused me further - there were two sections, one that said "The following plugins will be activated" and one that said "The following plugins will be installed". This was worrying since, as I mentioned, I was running offline at the time so wouldn't expect it to be able to install anything else (also it suggests I might therefore not be able to activate the features!) Plus, since I had downloaded the Complete version of the IDE from the web site, I would not have expected any further installation to be required (and had already deleted the installer shell script). On closer examination, however, I realised that these modules were in fact already Installed; the ones in the top half of the dialog were the ones in the category I had chosen to activate, and the ones in the lower half were listed with a different category. When I clicked to proceed, the next page listed both sets of modules in a single list under "The NetBeans IDE Installer has successfully activated the following plugins", so it seems that "Installed" is misleading and they were in fact being activated too. Just for fun, I tried Selecting the Struts module and Deactivating it. It was perfectly happy to let me do this, however, after the IDE had restarted I found that when I went back into the plugin manager I was unable to select and reactivate it! The only way to re-enable it seems to be to Activate the entire category again.
Actually, thinking about it, asides from the other categories' modules being described as "to be installed" rather than activated, the only real problem with the rest is that the "greyed out" inactive features and modules are completely disabled including (and especially) the Select checkboxes. I can understand the desire to differentiate them visually from the active ones, and giving them a "disabled" appearance kind of makes sense. The problem is that, although the module/feature is disabled, the checkbox/row in the table should not be (since it still needs to be possible to interact with it).
Thanks for detailed description of your inquiry. I'll try to reproduce it tomorrow, but from what I can say, the problem is in shared installation. Somehow the Installed tab disables the checkboxes. Strange, I thought it was already reported and fixed as bug 165841. The trouble is that due to some mistake, the fix was not probably integrated into 6.7 release.
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 165841 ***
Looks like it is something to do with shared installation; I ran netbeans with "sudo /usr/local/share/netbeans-6.7.1/bin/netbeans" and things worked okay; the feature names were in bold and the Select checkboxes were enabled. Should I raise a separate report about the message saying "installed" rather than "activated" for the other category's modules, or is that likely to be related? (i.e. without the user/permissions problem, it wouldn't have done that anyway)
I just tried to reproduce the problem and imho, the primary issue is that you need to check at least one checkbox before trying to activate/deactivate a module. I admit that having a popup menu that needs its item to be checked before showing it to really work, is sort of unnatural. This is at least for the second time I see similar confusion. I am not sure what could be done with it, but I am CCing Ondra to provide some advices. ats37: If checking the checkbox workarounds your hassle, then the bug is not P1, in fact it is a feature and not a bug. But feel free to report another P3 usability bug.