The karaf bugtracker and mailing lists contain a number of bugs that look like this one on the surface, dating back to 2010, and each one had a separate fix. My guess is that any number of underlying bugs in karaf or its assumed operating environment can cause the given error, and it’ll probably continue to re-appear now and then due to new underlying bugs. OpenHAB’s maintainers might consider this when integrating it.
That said, in my case, on Debian Jessie, /var/log/syslog showed some karaf error logging, indicating that was unable to infer the location of my JRE. You may want to start looking there yourself.