I'm on OpenSuse, I'm following this tutorial to set up Maven.
When I ran this :
export MAVEN_OPTS=-Xms256m -Xmx512m
bash: export: `-Xmx512m': not a valid identifier
The space in between both options makes the shell interpret this as two different arguments. You need to protect the options with quotes:
export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms256m -Xmx512m"