Installing Pentaho BI

For a customer proof of concept, I needed to create a Pentaho VM.

1. Installed Sun JDK and JRE and dos2unix.
$ sudo apt-get install tofrodos
$ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre

2. Updated profile for pentaho user

$ vi ~/.bashrc
inserted:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
export JAVA_HOME

3. Created directory tree for Pentaho

$ cd /opt
$ sudo mkdir pentaho
$ sudo chown pentaho:pentaho pentaho -R
$ cd pentaho

7. From http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/ downloaded latest versions of:
Report Designer
BI Server
Data Integration
Metadata
Extracted the files into the pentaho directory

8. Set Publisher password
$ cd /opt/pentaho
$ vi biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions/system/publisher_config.xml

9. Convert console.xml into UNIX file type.
$ dos2unix administration-console/resource/config/console.xml

11. Set up admin console

$ vi administration-console/resource/config/console.xml

./../biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions

./../biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho

12. Edited the log4j.xml so the log file would appear in the home directory

13. Set the hostname directly and added ip address for client machines in web.xml

$sudo vi /opt/pentaho/biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF/web.xml

from:

http://localhost:8080/pentaho/

to:

http://xxx.xxx.x.xxx:8080/pentaho/

added ip addresses for client machines for administration to the trusted ip list.

Some of these instructions come from here and here




How I decided on Drupal

When deciding on which CMS to use, I used the following criteria:

1. Drupal is based on PHP, mysql and CSS - three technologies I'm which are already familiar with.

2. www.whitehouse.gov recently chose Drupal. I'm going to assume that means that their experts believe that Drupal is secure and scaleable. I know this is lazy thinking; it could also mean that it will take a team of hundreds to keep Drupal secure and scaleable, but I'll test that out!

3. The Drupal ecosystem is so active that even the themes and modules have variations and plugins.

4. The Drupal sites I looked up look both attractive - and somewhat similar to each other. This suggests to me that the developers are able to get a lot out of the basics.

5. Adding my own applications to Drupal looks reasonably easy.

Setting up a Drupal Development Environment

My development environment runs in a Ubuntu 8.04LTS running in a VM. I followed these instructions which worked very well.