Having problems starting Pentaho Kettle Spoon on Linux? Here are some solutions ...

End of last year I decided it was time to ditch Ubuntu for a pure Gnome experience. I didn't quite fancy installing Gnome 3.10 on top of Ubuntu due to some user having problems with this. So Fedora looked like a good candidate. And having worked with it for nearly two months now, I must admit that I quite like the new clean Gnome interface (and Fedora). Gnome gets criticized everywhere, a lot of people don't have anything good to say about, but honestly to me it seems like the Gnome development is going into the right direction. But this of course a matter of personal taste. Enough on this, let's talk about Pentaho Kettle:

Quite often, Pentaho Kettle Spoon - the GUI for designing transformations and jobs - starts up just fine on Linux OSes. Sometimes though, there might be some dependencies to install or special flags to set.

When starting Pentaho Kettle on Fedora I came across this nasty error message:
spoon.sh: line 166: 10487 Aborted (core dumped) "$_PENTAHO_JAVA"

On other systems I also got this error message:

The error was 'BadDrawable (invalid Pixmap or Window parameter)'.

 (Details: serial 13561 error_code 9 request_code 62 minor_code 0)

 (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;

  that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.

  To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line

  option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful

  backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

To fix this problems, just add this to the spoon.sh OPS section:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

Another error message you might come across is the following:

org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467259

Matt Casters recommends installing libwebkitgtk instead of xulrunner.

 sudo yum install webkitgtk.x86_64
One dependency that you might have to install is xulrunner:

$ yum list xulrunner*

$ yum install xulrunner.x86_64

find the directory xulrunner is installed in:

$ which xulrunner

/usr/bin/xulrunner

To fix this open spoon.sh and add at the end of the OPS section:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib64/xulrunner/

This advice was originally posted here and here and in this blog post. Also here: Source1 and Source2.

Update 2014-07-20:
It turns out on Fedora 20 you do have to install xulrunner, but not via yum. Victor Sosa provided some instructions on this Jira case which I copy here for reference:

1) download the xulrunner 1.9.2 from here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/nightly/2012/03/2012-03-02-03-32-11-mozilla-1.9.2/xulrunner-1.9.2.28pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2. 

[ ... and copy it to a directory of your choice. Extract it.]

2) change this line in the spoon.sh 
The only change you need is 
OPT="$OPT -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/opt/xulrunner-1.9.2"


Did you get any other error messages when starting Spoon and found a solution for it? Please comment below and I'll add it to this blog post so that we have a good resource for trouble shooting.

Matt Casters:

FYI, the package to install  on Ubuntu is usually  libwebkitgtk-1.0-0 (as documented).  I'm sure it's the same on Fedora.  I would avoid all that xulrunner stuff if possible.
For those of us on Kubuntu there are bugs in theme oxygen-gtk so best switch to another theme like Ambiance of turn off a bunch of fancy-shmancy animations with oxygen-settings.

21/05/2014:
If you're having Spoon problems on Linux/OSX after an upgrade, try upgrading swt.jar from http://archive.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops4/R-4.3.2-201402211700/