fresh pepper installation is broken

[timn2008]

I've downloaded Pepper_2019.06.11.zip, unzipped it and was trying to run it under Windows7 with Java8 and Ubuntu Ubuntu 18.04 (with Java11 and with Java8), but st command fails for all exporting modules, e.g.,
Checking 'ANNISExporter'
Problems occured in: [A Pepper module 'Merger' is not ready to start., A Pepper module 'DOTManipulator' is not ready to start.]
Then, an attempt to perform ELAN-to-ANNIS conversion fails as well

As an attempt to run pepper 'convert' command leads to multiple "java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.apache.xerces.impl.xs.XMLSchemaValidator" (originating mostly from "org.corpus_tools.pepper.impl.PepperMapperControllerImpl.run"),
it seems that Apache Xerces2 might be missing, but I have not figured out how to add it to pepper (i.e., copying xercesImpl.jar to lib folder doesn't seem to help).

How can I fix this?
A further question is, is there any workable example workflow for ELAN-to-ANNIS coversion ???