Building IntelliJ Idea Community edition on Ubuntu 16.10

Building IntelliJ Idea on Ubuntu is just a bit more complex than simply executing ant.

Acquiring dependencies

The commented lines below are required if you wish to use jdk1.6; in practice, things seem to build without (as of May, 2017 at least)

#sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
#sudo apt-get update
#sudo apt-get install oracle-java6-installer
#sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev ant git
mkdir $HOME/tools
cd $HOME/tools
git clone git://git.jetbrains.org/idea/community.git idea
cd idea
./getPlugins.sh 
build/conf/install_nsis3.sh $HOME/tools/idea

If the build finishes with

...
scons: done building targets.

...the build of dependencies finished successfully.

Starting the build

If you've installed JDK1.6 (the commented lines above), here we need to refer to it (first line below). Again, IntelliJ Idea Community Edition builds without this, so left it commented out.

#export JDK_16_x64=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-oracle
cd $HOME/tools/idea
ant