I've been installing Fedora Commons on a Fedora 17 system. Everything has just gone like a charm and I followed this guide:
http://asingh.com.np/blog/fedora-commons-installation-and-configuration-guide/
However, whatever I do the service "Fedora Commons" won't start. There is nothing showing up in /var/log/messages
Running "service fedora start" ends with an OK, but when I afterwards run "service fedora status" it shows "Fedora Commons service is stopped".
Any ideas?
Fedora Commons can be somewhat picky about having an environment set up correctly. In general I prefer to install a new Tomcat servlet container and then choosing the "existingTomcat" custom install rather than having the Fedora Commons installer create a servlet container for you. By doing this you can more easily separate the servlet container install/config issues (lots of documentation on the web for this) from the Fedora Commons install/config issues (not so much information on this).
Also, when doing a new Fedora install I find it helps to download and deploy a servlet called "psi-probe" into the Tomcat container. It helps debugging environment issues as well as giving you an easy way to view log files for all your servlets from a common web interface.
http://code.google.com/p/psi-probe/
Further update: I forgot to mention one thing that also would prevent Fedora Commons from running and that is Fedora Commons does not seem to work well with the OpenJDK installed by default on many OS distributions. This can cause Fedora Commons to quietly fail with no log information even if the install was successful and correctly configured. Switching the environment variables to point to another version of JDK (other than OpenJDK) will resolve this problem.