This quck start guide is intended for those who are new to Liferay Portal or are interested in reviewing the latest version. The goal is to get your portal up and running on your machine as quickly as possible. A tour of Liferay Portal and an outline of core functionalities and key features will be given. Installing and setting up the portal on Microsoft Windows XP and Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 using the Liferay Portal and Apache Tomcat will be covered. Each of the topics covered here are also documented in much greater detail in the User Guide and Development Guide. This guide is a great starting point for anyone new to JSR-168 portals and evaluating the technology or reviewing the features of Liferay Portal.
Before we can get started, the following components must be installed on your server.
Getting and Installing Java JDK1.5
Download and install the Windows Platform - J2SE(TM) Development Kit 5.0 Update from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp.
From the Control Panel, go to System --> Advanced Tab --> Environment Variables
Add a new user variable called JAVA_HOME and point this to the directory where you installed the Java JDK.
Getting and Installing Liferay Portal and Tomcat Bundle
Download and install Liferay Portal Professional 4.0.0 ( Bundled with Tomcat and JDK5.0) here.
Unzip the bundle to a directory on your hard drive. Make sure the path of the directory does not have any spaces. Herein, we will call that directory TOMCAT_HOME.
Starting up Tomcat
Go into the bin directory where you installed the bundle TOMCAT_HOME/bin
Run the file startup.bat (if you are looking at it from the Windows Explorer, it may be called startup).
Your Apache Tomcat server should now be up with the precompiled Liferay Portal running on it. By default, the portal uses an embedded database called Hypersonic (HSQL). Point your browser to http://localhost:8080 and you should see the portal homepage.