OK, I got JDK 1.2.2 and TomCat installed on sparky. It took a while, because I had a lot of false starts on just how to get the software onto sparky. First, I thought I'd just download the JDK to sparky. However, Sun really went out of their way to prevent that with a draconian and buggy "login" process to javasoft.com. It wanted me to log in. I know I've gotten stuff from the site before, but I'd fogotten my login name and pasword. Luckily, they have a feature you can use to have that info mailed to you. So, I did that. But, then, armed with the correct login ID and password, I still couldn't get in. So, I re-registered, using the same info that I was mailed (as an experiment). Sure enough, it said that the ID was a dupe (so, is it active or not?). I gave in and created another ID. This got me into the site, but I discovered that the download was 20+ meg. I don't have the patience for that.
I decided to try to get the JDK off of one of the many CD-ROMS I have that likely contain the software (Java JumpStart). Stupidly, I didn't use a web browser to look at the CD contents, so I wasted a lot of time mounting and umounting the CD from buzz onto sparky and browsing from sparky trying to find stuff. I finally got smart and opened the index.html file in the root of the CD in a browser session on buzz, and found what I wanted there. However, when it came time to "download" the software, I got a permission error when trying to save the file to the sparkyhome mountpoint I'd created on buzz. Sigh. Gotta learn more about NFS, I guess. So, I "downloaded" locally to buzz. I then tried a couple more times to copy over the NFS mount without success. Running out of patience, I just ftp'd the file over.
Installing was dirt simple. I just did a "chmod +x" on the .bin file on sparky and ran it from my opt directory there. Smooth as silk. Updated the PATH export in my .profile and I was golden.
I next ftp'd the TomCat .tar file from buzz over to sparky and installed that. Again, simple as pie. I ran the tomcat.sh script and TomCat started right up. I switched over to buzz and typed "http://sparky:8080" into the URL of a Netscape session, and the TomCat home page came up. Woohoo!
Having accomplished all this, I now have sparky set up as a test environment for doing servlet and JSP development. I'm probably going to move my hosting to AO Industries, which is well-rated and supports servlets and JSPs (among a lot of other server-side scripting technologies).
