Tomcat6 Blank Page Displayed, No ROOT folder

Thought I would just post this for reference for others as I had to figure it out today. Perhaps it will save others some time.

Today I installed tomcat6 using:

zypper install tomcat6 tomcat6-admin-webapps tomcat6-docs-webapp

However, I was surprised to discover after starting tomcat and visiting http://localhost:8080/ that only a blank page was displayed. No errors where reported in catalina.out.

I am accustomed to normally seeing the default Tomcat Welcome page being displayed. With Suse, this is packaged separately, so you must also install:

zypper install tomcat6-webapps

(In fact, there is no ROOT directory in /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps until you install this package.)

Also, of course, you must edit /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml and configure your users and passwords before accessing http://localhost:8080/manager/html

Also of note, the admin panel previously used in Tomcat 5.x is no longer available in Tomcat6 so you will no longer see a link for that on the Welcome page.

Cheers,
Lews Therin