I tried to set up sqoop (sqoop-1.4.3.bin__hadoop-1.0.0) on Ubuntu. I can run the basic sqoop help etc without problems. When I run the following I get an error:
I had the same issue on Ubuntu.
My $JAVA_HOME was correctly set to /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64, but looking into /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/bin I noticed that "javac" was not there. That's what Sqoop needs but could not find.
So the problem was simply that my installation of Java came without Java compiler. The solution was then very simple:
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk