An update, I installed tomcat7 on a VM and it works just fine, so there's something different about this machine in particular. I got the packages identical on both machines and it still won't run.
I think it has to do with a java or tomcat path variables because the machine that won't start tomcat7 had a liferay portal all-in-one installation on /opt/liferay on it for a little bit.
I double-checked any system-wide variables on both machines with printenv and there are no differences.
Running /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/configtest.sh returns:
Code:
configtest.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE: /usr/share/tomcat7
Using CATALINA_HOME: /usr/share/tomcat7
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat7/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr
Using CLASSPATH: /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/bootstrap.jar:/usr/share/tomcat7/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:217)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:236)
at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:426)
On the VM where Tomcat7 works, there's no ClassNotFoundException error. Ideas?