I have had an HP Z800 Desktop for a number of years. Up until October, it had a couple of NVidia Quadro 4000 series video adapers. It had been running almost continuously. I shut it down when we had hurricane Gonzalo pass through. For me, power was disrupted for a little more than half a day. When I turned my computer back on, one video card refused to come on. I ran a couple days with one monitor, then decided to see what was up. On the second reboot, the second video card failed to come on.
Two video card failures back to back? My version of probabilities indicated a mother board problem. I purchased a replacement motherboard. Same issue. So... I ordered a couple replacement video cards. But instead of the Quadro 4000's, I updated a bit to the Quadro 5000's. A bit more power hungry, a bit more powerful, but not too heavy on the pocket book.
When they arrived, the computer came back on. Well, I have a spare a motherboard now, if nothing else.
The machine had been running Windows 7 from when the machine arrived. But since the various Microsoft licensing B.S. relies on machine attributes, and would be forced to go through Microsoft hoops to do this, I decided to add a couple additional drives, install Debian Jessie, and see what happens.
It worked out quite well. Debian comes with drivers which work with the card set. But there was a trick, which I will describe in another article.
II can see my old NTFS based drives. And I can run VirtualBox, which will run the new Windows Preview, which in turn runs Visual Studio C++ 2013.
But I digressed substantially from what I meant to talk about.
The Meat
I have been using NetBeans as a C++ development IDE. I was having problems getting it installed. I had the following error:
Exception: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError thrown from the UncaughtExceptionHandler in thread "main"
An article at Thanassis Bakalidis' artcle on Netbeans 7.x and Debian provided the solution. The solution is to use the '--silent' installer option. Also, the installation script has to be run from the directory in which it is located. In the same vein, the '--silent' option can be used with the uninstall.sh script.