Pentaho 3.6 on Ubuntu 10.04

I now have Pentaho 3.6 up and running on Ubuntu 10.04.  I'm running it on a Gateway Tower with an Intel Pentium 4 CPU @ 2.4GHz, with 2GB RAM, and 40GB hard drive.  Pentaho is performing well on this system, though I'm admittedly not running a lot of other services and haven't really taxed it yet.  We'll see how it does when I start to load some data on it.

Pentaho is a fairly straightforward install on Ubuntu, however I reconfigured it to run on MySQL instead of using the standard HSQLDB database that is bundled with the install package.  In addition to using the install and setup instructions in the Pentaho Solutions book, I also followed the MySQL 5.x guide located here by an Australian named Prashant Raju, which I found to be very useful.  I may convert it to PostgreSQL in the future, though for now I'm going to leave it as is.

A couple of details that I think are worth calling out within the installation and configuration steps:

1. If you want remote hosts to be able to access the server and run reports you must change 'localhost' to a resolvable hostname or IP address in the base-url property of the web.xml file located in the ../biserver-ce/tomcat/webapps/pentaho/WEB-INF directory.  Otherwise remote hosts will be able to access the server but reports, dashboards, etc. will not execute and display properly.  This is covered in the on-line install guide I referenced above, but is an important step that is easy to miss.
2. The JDBC pentaho security files and JDBC configuration files for the tomcat server have changed since the writing of Pentaho Solutions, follow the instructions in the on-line MySQL 5.x guide referenced above.
3. I noticed that Pentaho/Tomcat did not react well when I was playing with the xml configuration files.  Although I bounced the server via the included start/stop scripts for Pentaho, I found that I sometimes needed to bounce the system after making config changes.  Otherwise I would get very strange errors in the browser when accessing and running reports, dashboards, charts, etc.
4. I'd recommend caution if you're considering moving the ../biserver-ce/pentaho-solutions directory from it's standard location.  The on-line guide recommended doing this, I believe just for convenience of access, but it caused some issues for me and I changed it back to it's original location.
5. I do recommend setting up a pentaho user account and running the pentaho and tomcat services under that account, and configuring the Pentaho BI server to start automatically at boot.  This is not covered within the online guide referenced above, but can be done in the standard way by creating a startup script and placing it into /etc/init.d and adding it to the services startup list.  This is covered well in the Pentaho Solutions book, and also in plenty of places online.  If you need help with this, here's the standard Ubuntu community doc link.

Well, I think that's it for now.