While developing a report you should be able to right click on the report design element and run the preview command to view the report.
While you can include links to reports in enterprise portal you don't necessarily have to have enterprise portal set up to view a report. Reports are often triggered by menu items that are added to menus in the AX client.
The ax prerequisite checked (on the install media) should be able to tell you if you need to install anything to begin developing reports.
The general pattern for report development is that you define either an ax query to return the report data or a class that is an ax report provider to return the report data. Then in the report designer you create a report and add a data set, set the data provider type (to query or report data provider) and pick your query or report data provider class.
Once the data set is defined, you add a design element and start defining how you want to display the data.
There are several online walkthroughs for report creation. Here are some examples you could look at to get started.
www.dynamics101.com/.../developing-ssrs-report-using-report-data-provider-microsoft-dynamics-ax-2012
dynamicsaxgyan.wordpress.com/.../learn-quick-first-ssrs-report-in-dynamics-ax-2012
msdn.microsoft.com/.../cc653472(v=ax.50).aspx
technet.microsoft.com/.../cc636713.aspx
Hope this helps,
Lance