Symptoms

The rich text editor is not displayed for a new Confluence installation. When editing a page only the "Wiki Markup" and "Preview" tab are displayed.

Cause

Although a different symptom, the root cause is the same as detailed in Getting Error "extractBundledPlugins Couldn't find atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip on classpath":

Using Solaris's built in tar utility can cause files with long paths to be cut off. E.g. confluence/WEB-INF/classes/com/atlassian/confluence/setup/atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip is considered a long path.

If this file name is corrupt, bundled plugins will not be installed during installation. One of the bundled plugins is the "TinyMCE Editor Plugin", which is responsible for the rich text editor tab.

Resolution

As detailed in this knowledge base article:

You need to use GNU tar when untarring your install file as described in Installing Confluence Standalone on Unix.