Making the jump to linux

With some help from another engineer at work, I've wiped my computer clean of windows xp and installed Ubuntu. I then added KDE and off I went (I know the I could have started with Kubuntu, but...).

I downloaded the linux versions of Eclipse, Sun Java 6 SDK, and Oracle SQL Developer. I added the Web Tools Platform to eclipse for JSP, Tomcat, etc.

With those tools I was ready to go.

Here's where I had some problems. I tried to start sqldeveloper and it just threw exceptions. The problem? I had not set the JAVA_HOME environment. So I ran this command:

   > export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk

Now sqldeveloper starts just fine.

But I don't want to have to do that every time. So I put the command above in the /usr/environment file. Now every time I start a session, the environment variable is set.