Install Pentaho with GUI on EC2 Linux Instance

In this post I will introduce how to install and visit the GUI interface from VNC client. I have been sitting here for 4 hours and were so frustrated for all the BUGS I saw.. Hopefully this post will help you get this done within one hour.

Now let’s get started!!

Security Group

When you run an instance, please edit the inbound traffic rules of security group:
Protocol: Customed TCP/IP, Port 5901.

This step is critical for setting up VNC server which we will introduce later. See ref.

Install Java

Pentaho runs on Java. Installation instruction goes here.
Please, please check you’ve installed the SAME version of JDK and JRE! If you get error message “Unsupported major.minor version 52.0” then it’s very likely the version doesn’t match. At least it was the problem for me. Well it’s also possible that there is something wrong with yout /etc/environment : either you didn’t set up JAVA_HOME and Path; or you forgot to run source /etc/environment to confirm your setup.

Download the bin

File is available at here . If you can’t download with wget; try transfer downloads to your instance using filezilla. It took only half an hour to download and transfer to instance.
After downloading (& transfering), run
chmod a+x pentaho-business-analytics-7.0.0-x64.bin

./pentaho-business-analytics-7.0.0-x64.bin

Install VNC server on server side

Steps as in Reference:

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sudo useradd -m pentaho
sudo passwd pentaho
sudo usermod -aG admin pentaho
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install vnc4server
su - pentaho
vncserver
vncserver -kill :1
vim /home/pentaho/.vnc/xstartup

and then change the document xstartup tp:

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#!/bin/sh
export XKL_XMODMAP_DISABLE=1
unset SESSION_MANAGER
unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS
[ -x /etc/vnc/xstartup ] && exec /etc/vnc/xstartup
[ -r $HOME/.Xresources ] && xrdb $HOME/.Xresources
xsetroot -solid grey
vncconfig -iconic &
gnome-panel &
gnome-settings-daemon &
metacity &
nautilus &
gnome-terminal &

start VNC server again.

Very Important: user name to start VNC server should be the same as username to run ./spoon.sh. Else will encounter org.eclipse.swt.SWTError.

Download VNC client

I found RealVNC simple and good to use. After installation, open:
${your public DNS}:1

Open Pentaho

In VNC client, open terminal.
Navigate using
cd /computer/home/pentaho/Pentaho/design-tools/data-integration/
Final step: run
./spoon.sh

DONE!!!!