Hi,
I have
java: 1.4 j2sdk1.4.2_04
jakarta-tomcat-5.0.27, JAVA_HOME is set up correctly.
Mandrake 10 community edition
These experiments are done as root.

I've tried (successfully) installing tomcat binaries and (successfully) building tomcat from source. In both cases the same thing happens, when, in a console, I type (from the tomcat/bin directory)
. startup.sh

then the script runs then fails. The console window the script runs in then crashes (closes) in the processes, exasperatingly. No error messages. I piped the output into a log file and got this:
Using CATALINA_BASE: /usr/local/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME: /usr/local/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/local/tomcat/temp
Using JAVA_HOME: /usr/java/j2sdk1.4.2_04

Other java stuff, like Eclipse 3 that I've just installed, work fine. That's all I have to go on. Can anyone give me a clue on how to solve the tomcat problem?
Many thanks,
Jim

Ah, I've sovled this problem, it was because I was typing from the console

. startup.sh

and I should have typed

./startup.sh

Aargh silly me! It works fine now, but I learned a lot about linux and java in trying to find out the answer
Linux authors - this is a console bug, you might want to fix it