Ubuntu – Starting tomcat on ubuntu

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').

Tomcat does not use the CLASSPATH in the webapp's classloader. You can add paths and files to the common.loader line in conf/catalina.properties. The classloader should have found the class when the jar was in WEB-INF/lib. I can't explain why it hasn't. If you are using 5.5, you can place the jar in common/lib or lib/ if you're using tomcat6. This path is loaded by a higher level classloader and should be picked up first.