I downloaded Pentaho Data Integration (or Kettle) to my Windows 10 machine from the sourceforge link on the Pentaho Community website. After unzipping the files I followed the instructions on the community website for launching the software, quoted here:
After unzipping the downloaded file, you can launch Spoon by navigating to the folder /data-integration and double clicking Spoon.bat
My OS doesn't recognize any .bat file in the specified folder, but a Windows Batch File of the same name is in the folder, and it has the same size (4 KB) which the Spoon.bat file is meant to have, so I believe it is the same file referred to in the instructions.
Opening this file seems to execute the batch instruction in a command prompt window which immediatey disappears. No other effect is observed; in particular, no software is launched.
I googled and found that a common cause for issues of this kind is not having the a 64-bit version of java installed. So I installed a 64-bit version of the java runtime environment from this link and followed the approach described in this forum post for putting links to the java executables in the path that pentaho expects.
This had no effect, even after I restarted my computer.
Is there a simpler way to get this software working that I don't know about, or a step that I've missed here? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
The thing that got it working for me was to follow the advice in this post which specifies modifying the Spoon batch file by replacing -Xmx2048m with -Xmx1024m in the string
if: "%PENTAHO_DI_JAVA_OPTIONS%"=="" set PENTAHO_DI_JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xms1024m" "-Xmx2048m" "-XX:MaxPermSize=256m"
(because 32-bit java cannot handle the 2048m).