I got the Arduino IDE working on Debian #Linux!  Why is this worth announcing?  Well, to let it upload stuff over the USB serial link, I had to add myself to the "dialout" group with
<br />sudo usermod -a -G dialout user 
<br />...but this change only takes effect after a logout or reboot and I can't be bothered to do that because I don't like restoring all my windows back to where they were.  However, last night I had a 90 minute power cut so had to reboot.