When posting can you use black or dark colors. Blue on blue is difficult to see for some of us. You need to put java in your path. In which directory is java installed on your system?

You didn't provide more info about where java is installed. Did you manage to put it in your path?

You must add some text to your .BASHRC file. Here is mine
The text "/opt/jdk1.5.0_04" below is MY jdk path. Write yours.

export PATH=/opt/jdk1.5.0_04/bin:$PATH
export JAVA_HOME="/opt/jdk1.5.0_04"
export CLASSPATH=.:/opt/jdk1.5.0_04

ok... I dont want to take over this thread but I have a similar problem too
I also get the javac command not found. Here is what my system says

How should I proceed. Thank you.

mrcheecks. I have already used that code to get the output that I have posted in my previous post. I have tried changing the options but it doesnt seem to work.
Does anyone know what I am doing wrong :-(

It's a difficult question, what went wrong there. You will need to retrace your steps with a 'dry run' not installing anything. It seems odd that you have java in /opt directory. It sounds like you are trying to run java 2 and java 5 at the same time. It doesn't really matter where it resides, but there are many scripts that look for it and the libraries in the usual place /usr. Unless you tell these scripts explicitly where to look, you will get unpredictable behavior. Note, not all scripts have sanity checks examining the PATH or JAVA_HOME variables before running. If they don't find the components they just quit.

On my SuSE 10 I have both java 2 and java 5 alongside each other. I don't know if fedora runs config scripts after all hardware is configured. On my system the environment settings are configured by scripts in /etc/profile.d/ directory. You can add customized scripts for different circumstances and only set the 'executable' bit when you need it. For example, I have Eclipse in my /home/Eclipse/eclipse directory, so I need to export every time I want to run it, here's an example

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/profile.d/eclipse_home.sh
#
# This script sets PATH variable to accomodate Eclipse.

if [ -x /home/Eclipse/eclipse ] ; then
export PATH=$PATH:/home/Eclipse/eclipse
fi

# This file was created by joe on 06/11/2005
# and appended to the /etc/profile.d directory.

Here's another example that configures "alljava". It's a bit redundant, setting and unsetting different variables, but maybe it will help you.

#
# /etc/profile.d/alljava.sh
#
# send feedback to http://www.suse.de/feedback

#
# This script sets some environment variables for default java.
# Affected variables: PATH, JAVA_BINDIR, JAVA_HOME, JRE_HOME,
# JDK_HOME, SDK_HOME
#

__libdir=lib
if [ -x /usr/lib64/jvm/java ] || [ -x /usr/lib64/jvm/jre ] ; then
__libdir=lib64
fi

if [ -x /usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/bin/java ] || [ -x /usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/bin/jre ] ; then
export JAVA_BINDIR=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/bin
export JAVA_ROOT=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java
if [ -x /usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/jre/bin/java ] ; then
export JRE_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/jre
else
export JRE_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java
fi
unset JDK_HOME
unset SDK_HOME
if [ -x /usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/bin/javac ] ; then
# it is development kit
if [ -x /usr/$__libdir/jvm/java/bin/jre ] ; then
export JDK_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java
else
export JDK_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java
export SDK_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/java
fi
fi
else
if [ -x /usr/$__libdir/jvm/jre/bin/java ] ; then
# it is IBMJava2-JRE or SunJava2-JRE
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/$__libdir/jvm/jre/bin
export JAVA_BINDIR=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/jre/bin
export JAVA_ROOT=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/jre
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/jre
export JRE_HOME=/usr/$__libdir/jvm/jre
unset JDK_HOME
unset SDK_HOME
fi
fi

unset __libdir

Allmost forgot, you need SDK if you want javac, jre is only a runtime environment.