Wanted to install LimeWire.
It told me that cannot live without jre.
It seemed to be a modest request compared to that of other applications of the same kind in Linux, so said OK.
Got and installed one jre from rpm, just to satisfy its moods.
LimeWire still keeps telling me it wants a jre.
Can you tell me, please, exactly how many jre's one LimeWire needs in Linux?
And that what's wrong with me, again?

I would reather get a precompiled java from
http://www.blackdown.org
and edit your path after decompressing the file. It must work.

Which jre rpm did you install? I would recommend simply getting the latest jre directly from Sun at
http://www.sun.com
or using the Blackdown version as recommended in the other reply. But you have to be sure that the jre is then in your PATH statement, or none of your programs will know how to find it!

How can I edit the PATH statement? That would possibly solve my problem!

Edit your .bash_profile to include the java bin. I just installed the j2sdk1.4.0 this weekend. My PATH in my user account looked something like this:

PATH=/usr/java/j2sdk1.4.0/bin/:$PATH:$HOME:.

Thank you for the tip, but it did not work:

I inserted the following line into all .bash_profile files found on my machine (/root/.bash_profile, /etc/skel/.bash_profile and /home/$user/.bash_profile):

PATH=/usr/java/jre1.3.1_02/bin:$PATH:$HOME/bin

I also tried inserting and omitting the "export PATH" statement at the end of the files.

I checked ten times that the java binary is actually in the /usr/java/jre1.3.1_02/bin directory, yet LimeWire keeps telling me that no java VM could be found from my PATH environment variable.
If only I knew how to query that variable... And above all: how could I test the new configuration without restarting the machine...
I am getting tired of such things happening every time I try to install just a damned programs.

I finally succeeded: never saw a unix shell script before, but somehow I was lucky enough to find out that although /root/.bash_profile has uncommented PATH lines, those lines are not active in my case, but the script calls /root/bashrc where the actual PATH statement is.
LimeWire found jre at last and works well.
Thank you for your help, it gave me a good starting point.
(But still I wasted almost 10 hours to the simplest program installation which could have been done with three clicks and in 10 minutes in windows while the result would have been the same - so I begin to think of myself as a complete fool)