I am in the process of building a automated RedHat Linux installer which requires me to configure the following on a RedHat Enterprise Machine:
RedHat has stopped providing any kind of Java binaries with their base OS, you have to buy a copy of the RedHat Application Server for $999.
As is often the case in this kind of situation there are other options that does not cost money, the group over at JPackage.Org does a great job of packaging all things Java in generic RPMs that will work on most RPM based distributions.
There are limitations though, jpackage is not allowed to distribute binaries of the non-free code such as the Sun JVM itself but they do provide source RPMs that lets you build this on your own after downloading the source from the Sun website.
I have written up a Wiki entry that details from start to end the process in getting the above working on CentOS. CentOS is of course a binary distribution of RedHat Enterprise Linux, they take the opensource SRPMs as provided by RedHat and removes all RedHat branding from the OS giving you a functional equivalent to RedHat Enterprise without the price tag. I use it on my development systems and so for the moment this guide only applies directly to CentOS though the differences are small.
This may look daunting at first but it really is not, once you’ve built the binary RPMs of the non-free code it is a breeze to install many machines with these RPMs using only a few commands and 1 config file. So you’ll soon reap the benefits especially if you are tasked with configuring a cluster of webservers that should all be on the same patch levels.
You can find the full guide here: Tomcat 5 on RedHat Enterprise Linux using JPackage.org Packages.
