Overview: What is Pentaho?

Pentaho is an open source Business Intelligence (BI) Suite that comes in with either commercial support (http://www.pentaho.com/) and or community support (http://community.pentaho.com/).

This post provides instructions for the Pentaho community edition suite.

Create a pentaho user and group

Open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo addgroup pentaho

sudo adduser --system --ingroup pentaho --disabled-login pentaho

Install Java

Follow the JDK installation instructions that are listed in the following post: Install Java JDK 6.0 update 31 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Install the Pentaho BI Server

Now that we have Java installed we can get on with our main task of installing the Pentaho BI Server.

1. Download the Pentaho BI Server from http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Latest+Stable+Builds. I’m using the current stable build for x64 Linux which is biserver-ce-4.5.0-stable.tar.gz.
2. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo mkdir /opt/pentaho

cd ~/Downloads

gunzip biserver-ce-4.5.0-stable.tar.gz

tar xf biserver-ce-4.5.0-stable.tar

sudo mv biserver-ce /opt/pentaho/biserver-ce-4.5.0

sudo mv administration-console /opt/pentaho/administration-console-ce-4.5.0

cd /opt/pentaho

sudo ln -s biserver-ce-4.5.0 biserver-ce

sudo ln -s administration-console-ce-4.5.0 administration-console

sudo chown -R pentaho:pentaho /opt/pentaho

Start the Pentaho Server

Open a terminal, then enter the following commands:

Note:
The following command is only required if you downloaded a Windows .zip file by accident. If this is the case, then none of the .sh files will be executable.
sudo find /opt/pentaho/ -type f -name '*.sh' -exec chmod 744 '{}' \+

cd /opt/pentaho/biserver-ce

sudo -u pentaho ./start-pentaho.sh

Login to the Pentaho User Console

1. Open a web browser to http://localhost:8080.
2. Click Evaluation Login and select a user type to login as.

Login to the Pentaho Administration Console

Open a terminal, then enter the following commands:

cd /opt/pentaho/administration-console

sudo -u pentaho ./start-pac.sh

1. Open a web browser to http://localhost:8099.
2. Enter a User Name of admin.
3. Enter a Password of password.
4. Click Log In.

That’s it. The core Pentaho BI server is installed and ready for development. However, a good next step is to change the database that Pentaho uses and install the Pentaho Design Studio (PDS), but we’ll leave that for future posts.

Hadoop also port 8080, so you will either need to use a different port for the Pentaho User Console or change the Hadoop MapReduce ShuffleHandler port.