I started it and wanted to start a new project. What a surprise I have seen I could not. There were no menu items besides import existing ant project what I could reach. Holy s.... something! What is this? I was asking. Tried to purge package and reinstall but no luck. So finally I concluded that the problem is around Netbeans 5.5. What can people do than? I have taken the lattes version Netbeans 6.0 and tried. Much more surprise I had the same situation. No menu to create new project. I started to think about some kind of global conspiracy and decided to unveil it so the day just turned darker. Solution: $ rm -rf ~/.netbeans/6.0/config/Modules Simple right? If you are missing New Project Templates in Netbeans and you have started netbeans ever with IcedTea Java 7 - or any other "unsupported one" - first use only SUN Java as long as this error is not corrected to run netbeans. I do not know if this is an error in Iced Tea Java or in Netbeans and do not care too much anymore.