title: Starting kafka on Linux or Win
body: <p>I have tried for the last 10 hours to start the kafka server but I couldn't.</p>
  
  <p>I managed to install zookeeper and run it on win10 but I had the </p>
  
  <pre><code>classpath is empty. please build the project first e.g. by running 'gradlew 
   jarall'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>error.</p>
  
  <p>So I installed ubuntu and the jre 9, zookeeper workd fine here ,too. But kafka does not. The latest error I get is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[0.000s][warning][gc] -Xloggc is deprecated. Will use -Xlog:gc:/home/emi/kafka/bin/../logs/kafkaServer-gc.log instead.
  Unrecognized VM option 'PrintGCDateStamps'
  Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
  Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I even switched to java 8 and tried different versions of kafka, but I can't get it going. In both cases I don't think it's a problem of environement variables for java since zookeeper works just fine: java -version returns </p>
  
  <pre><code>    java version "1.8.0_151"
  Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_151-b12)
  Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.151-b12, mixed mode)
  </code></pre>