The instructions in the official documentation at Administration - installation - WAR - Tomcat do not work on Debian Lenny. Follow the steps below to install Magnolia on Tomcat running on Debian.

Deploy WAR

To deploy the .war file:

1. Stop Tomcat.
2. Edit .../init.d/tomcat5.5 by:
   • Turning off Tomcat security. If you omit this step Magnolia will not deploy. Find TOMCAT6_SECURITY=yes in the file and replace it with TOMCAT_SECURITY=no.
   • Adapting the JVM Heap size to at least 512MB (e.g. JAVA_OPTS="-Xms512m -Xmx512m"). Find the following:

     if [ -z "$JAVA_OPTS" ]; then
         JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx128M"
     fi
     

     And replace it with:

     if [ -z "$JAVA_OPTS" ]; then
         JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx512M -Xms512M"
     fi
     

3 Copy the Magnolia .war file into the Tomcat /webapps folder. In the standard setup this is at /usr/share/tomcat6.X/webapps/.
4 Restart Tomcat and wait for the process to complete, i.e. until Tomcat completely restarted.

Remove .war file and restart Tomcat

1. Stop Tomcat.
2. Remove the Magnolia .war file from the Tomcat /webapps, but do not touch the extracted Magnolia Tomcat /webapps folder.
3. Restart Tomcat.

Launch Magnolia

1. To complete the setup, launch Magnolia AdminCentral, by pointing your browser to e.g http://localhost:8080/magnoliaAuthor.
2. After WAR deployment you can reset default heap size that was changed in #DeployWAR above.

Please also see Too many open files issue if you are running Magnolia on Linux with a file-based database.