Introduction
Kettle is Pentaho’s ETL tool, which is also called Pentaho Data Integration (PDI).
Installing Kettle is extremely simple.
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
Download
To download the Kettle either run the following command, or follow the bulleted steps below.
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/pentaho/Data%20Integration/4.3.0-stable/pdi-ce-4.3.0-stable.tar.gz
Or follow the steps below if you don’t want to use the wget command shown above.
- Open a web browser to http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Latest+Stable+Builds.
- Click 4.3.0-stable.
- Click pdi-ce-4.3.0-stable.tar.gz.
Installation
Next, open a terminal and enter the following commands:
cd ~/Downloads
tar -xzf pdi-ce-4.3.0-stable.tar.gz
mv data-integration ~/bin/pdi-ce-4.3.0
cd ~/bin
ln -s pdi-ce-4.3.0 data-integration
cd ~/bin/data-integration
To run Spoon:
./spoon.sh
Additional Reading
There is a lot of good documentation installed with PDI.
cd ~/bin/data-integration/docs/English
Open your favorite PDF viewer, or type:
evince getting_started_with_pdi.pdf
AkbarAhmed.com 
So about Java … ?
I made the assumption (perhaps when I should not have) that by the time a person is installing Kettle, that Java would have already been installed.
I will add a link to the Java installation instructions.
Thanks for the feedback.
Great installation Blogs. This isn’t the first of yours I’ve used (and recommended). On this one I am confused about the – (dash) before the /bin…. (I know about ~ home, but not dash except for “su -” where the dash specifies assume root’s configuration in addition to root’s permissions ) I hadn’t seen the dash before and it gives an error on my terminal.
Is this a typo or blog formatting glitch, or should I keep trying to make it work on my system?
Hi,
That’s a tilde before /bin, as in ~/bin. It’s rendering correctly on my machine (both Firefox and Chrome). I also checked in the WordPress editor.
However, it sounds like it’s not rendering correctly on your machine…which means other people are probably experiencing the same issue.
Which browser/OS is it rendering as a dash? I know that WordPress sometimes munges the characters, so if that’s the case here then I’ll add a note to the post.
With regard to the post, I’m using a (tilde) ~/bin to mean the bin directory in $HOME/bin. I use it as part of my normal practice, but it also helps in posts so that I don’t have to write notes asking people to change ‘akbar’ to ‘enter your username’.
Also, thanks for the positive feedback. It’s always appreciated.
Thanks,
Akbar
My desktop is Ubuntu 12.04 (and the remote server is ubuntu 12.04) I’m a no Windows guy.
I just updated FireFox this week to whatever ubuntu updated it to, … maybe v19. But not only did it look like a dash, I used the copy paste method and it was a dash. So the character encoding was wrong somewhere. (and you don’t need to put all this personal conversation on the web. I’ll write another Compliment without all the other stuff. :- )