Linux – Tomcat: how to change location of manager and host-manager to a subdirectory

Is Tomcat6 the requirement? What version of Centos? (I'm assuming "Tomcat of some sort" and "current Centos" which would be 5.3 as of this writing)

You don't need the jpackage repo unless you want Tomcat 6. Also, Centos 5.3 ships with openjdk 1.6.0, which has passed the Java SE 6 TCK.

Simply "yum install tomcat5" should pull in all the dependencies you would need (including openjdk), many of which will be based off the jpackage sources. Once it's installed, all you need is "service tomcat5 start" to start it up. NOTE: Running your web container as root is very, very bad because it is a massive security risk. The tomcat5 service installed by the repository version will drop its permissions to a 'tomcat' user with more limited permissions. To have tomcat start automatically when the system boots, use "chkconfig tomcat5 on".

In your case above, the port 8080 is probably blocked by the default firewall. You can turn the firewall off (recommended only for testing connectivity, do not run without the firewall in production) with "service iptables stop". Centos provides both a GUI and Text UI tool (system-config-securitylevel and system-config-securitylevel-tui respectively) for modifying the firewall, or you can use iptables directly (see 'man iptables').

Read more about mod_proxy_ajp or mod_jk. One of these modules will help you to have tomcat apps served by apache.
You cannot have two services on the same port, unless, you bind the services to different IPs.
Assuming you have two IPs you bind apache on first IP port 80 and tomcat on the second.

The easiest is using apache modules. Search for tomcat and apache configs that meet your needs.

HTH