You don't need to set up tomcat, Pentaho Server has it's own tomcat, that's only needed if you already have a tomcat server and want to use it instead of the one in Pentaho.
You don't need a external database (although for querying access and activity I prefer to set up one instead of creating an ETL for the logs), so you can skip those steps also and configure it later if you need it.
For a initial set up, you just set up Java, unzip and execute the start-pentaho.sh (it might have a different name, I think is different depending on Pentaho version, the directory when you unzip the file has certainly changed) and then connect to http://localhost:8080/pentaho/Login to test everything is correct. Starting up Pentaho server takes some time, so you usually check
This blog entry is for an older version of Pentaho, but the steps are basically the same (he also talks of setting up PDI), normally setting up the server involves (for me):
- unzipping
- adding convenient drivers to connect to my databases
- setting up the external database to add log information
- setting up connection to our LDAP instead of the default users of Pentaho Server
We don't use a repository with PDI, and use the internal server database for the files in the server (HBSQL).
There's something you have to do to setup https, but I didn't do it on our production server, and on my local tests I don't set it up, probably is explained in Pentaho official documentation or some blog entry, or it is something standard to set up on Tomcat.