Hi.
A few months ago i got hold of an acer aspire one running linpus linux.
In order to play runescape, i needed java, so a few months back i spent a week trying to get it to work. After gazing at poorly descriptive instructions (some of which were totally wrong) i gave up.
I never removed my previous attempts, and cant remember how far i got.
In the folder: My Disk:///Desktop, there is a jre-6u17-linux-i586.rpm file, the file icon is a cog with 'rpm' on it infront of a blue background.

I seriously have no idea what i did, as it was a while back. I can remember accepting the terms, and then a big download process, i think i however got stuck after that point.

If anyone knows how to finish this process off, please help, as its truely driving me insane .

Try to install the Java package from the console. Start the terminal with Ctrl+T, next use cd to go to the Desktop.

cd ~/Desktop

Finally install the package with the command:

rpm -Uvh java*.rpm

Hope it will work

Well, this is what happened:

[user@localhost ~]$ sudo bash
[root@localhost ~]# cd ~/Desktop
[root@localhost Desktop]# rpm -Uvh java*.rpm
error: File not found by glob: java*.rpm
[root@localhost Desktop]#

sorry it should be

sudo rpm -Uvh jre*.rpm

My mistake

Hi.
I had a feeling I'd already installed it... And here's what happened:
[user@localhost ~]$ sudo bash
[root@localhost ~]# cd ~/Desktop
[root@localhost Desktop]# sudo rpm -Uvh jre*.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
package jre-1.6.0_17-fcs is already installed
[root@localhost Desktop]#
I need help activating it now and getting Firefox 2 to recognize it. Something called Iced Tea is already installed, don't know if that makes any difference.
Thanks.

IcedTea is Java from Red Hat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IcedTea), so you have java already installed.