Can't start Tomcat on Ubuntu

Question

I installed Tomcat on Ubuntu. Then I created a new user. Then did:

liferay@web-svr:~/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin$ chmod +x *.sh

Afterwards, I added JAVA_HOME and PATH in bash like this:

JAVA_HOME=/etc/jdk1.7.0_07
export JAVA_HOME
PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
export PATH

Then I started Tomcat:

 liferay@web-svr:~/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin$ sh startup.sh

And I get this error:

liferay@web-svr:~/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin$ sh startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64
Using CLASSPATH:       /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin/bootstrap.jar:/home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
touch: cannot touch ‘/home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/logs/catalina.out’: Permission denied
./catalina.sh: 389: ./catalina.sh: cannot create /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/logs/catalina.out: Permission denied

I did:

su admin
chmod 755  /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/logs/

But that doesn't help. What can be wrong?

UPDATE OK I did:

sudo chmod 777 /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/logs/catalina.out

And now when I start Tomcat I get this error:

liferay@web-svr:~/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin$ sh startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-amd64
Using CLASSPATH:       /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin/bootstrap.jar:/home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/bin/tomcat-juli.jar

UPDATE2

I have a mistake in JAVA_HOME. Now i have it correct. But When i start a tomcat i still have same output and in catalina.out i have ~1000 lines of errors and line:

июл 17, 2013 8:48:45 AM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
INFO: Server startup in 24802 ms

And in myhost:80 i have a blank page and on myhost:8080 i have 404 in FireBug and blank page in browser.

Solution

This is a line of error:

touch: cannot touch ‘/home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/logs/catalina.out’: Permission denied
./catalina.sh: 389: ./catalina.sh: cannot create /home/liferay/liferay-portal-6.1.1-ce-ga2/tomcat-7.0.27/logs/catalina.out: Permission denied

Everything you posted after you fixed the permissions is not an error, those are simply log messages informing you that the server started up and what specifically happened during startup.

To see if tomcat is up and running you can try netstat -l and/or check your .conf for whether port 80 or 8080 or something totally different is configured.

It simply showing a blank page at the root / is not necessarily a sign of a problem as well, it also depends on what was configured in the tomcat and the liferay installation. To further support you on this a more specific topic is needed.