I give up Pentaho, Jaspersoft's won my business

I really like Pentaho but their attitude towards virtualization has left them without any appliance options and I just have too much to do. Jaspersoft's competing product can be downloaded in virtual form and I can just run with it. The time and effort to work uphill on this is just not worth it at present. After all, I've got Citizen Intelligence to work on as my actual project. The infrastructure stuff like this has to take a back seat.

Pentaho major release coming

This project is on hold until I evaluate BI 4.0

Minor gotcha - 1

Don't forget to disconnect the Ubuntu iso file otherwise the VM will boot to it.

Setting up Pentaho Community Edition Java prerequisite

In the previous step, I skipped putting in Tomcat because it simply does not play nice with the included Tomcat that Pentaho ships with. I noticed in my google searches that somebody else had relatively recently (2009) tried to set up a Pentaho appliance. It obviously never got to the stage of being listed in the VMWare appliance list but I'm going to use it as a starting point for my own work.

So here's the stuff I actually did to get java rolling
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
# This adds the add-apt-repository command
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
# actually add the repository
sudo apt-get update
#update apt-get so that it knows where to find Sun's java
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre
# install java 6 JRE and JDK
sudo vi ~/.bashrc
#edit your bash rc file
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
#add this to the end of the file

logout, log back in and echo $JAVA_HOME to make sure that /usr is listed as the java home directory

Now it's time to get Pentaho downloaded

Set up OS, Ubuntu 11.04 server

Set up ubuntu server iso as the cdrom on the vm and just let it install a core LAMP server. I wasn't sure how the vm would handle networking on a 1 network Windows box so I originally started it up without a network card. I added it later using these instructions. Also needed to set up DNS using sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf and the following nameserver lines

nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 202.51.5.52



YMMV

Up next, Java

Need an unrar utility

Installed 7-zip and then immediately uninstalled the extra stuff they add. No link love for them.

Building on past work

There's a very old Pentaho VM machine for Pentaho 2.0 here. Thanks Dataprix for giving me something to start with.