title: Error registering a Tomcat 7 server in Netbeans 7 (Catalina Home folder is not valid)
body: <p>I'm running Netbeans 7.0.1 on Linux Mint DE.  Netbeans was installed through the distro's repositories.  I've now installed the package tomcat7-user so I can create a user instance of Tomcat which I can start or stop as required.  When I start this instance (using bin/startup.sh) the script reports:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/david/tomcat
  Using CATALINA_HOME:   /usr/share/tomcat7
  Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/david/tomcat/temp
  Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
  Using CLASSPATH:       /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/bootstrap.jar:/usr/share/tomcat7/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
  Tomcat started
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So, in Netbeans, I go to Tools -> Servers, click Add Server, select Apache Tomcat, click next and in the Server Location (Catalina Home) field I put <code>/usr/share/tomcat7</code>.  But Netbeans reports:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>The specified Server Location (Catalina Home) folder is not valid.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I thought perhaps it's a permissions issue so I (temporarily) chmoded everything in /usr/share/tomcat7 (including that folder itself) to 0777 but still that error message appears.  So my next thought is maybe there's something missing, so I symlinked all of the folders in Catalina base into Catalina home, but still no luck.</p>
  
  <p>Now it would be very helpful if Netbeans actually told you not just that a problem exists, but what the problem actually is, too.  I'm quite close to going through the Netbeans source code to find out what it actually wants, but if anyone could shed some light on this for me that would save me an awful lot of fuss!</p>