Installing Tomcat 6.x on CentOS 5 UPDATE: This post was revised to work with java6u10 and now includes instructions for automated startup config. FYI: if you used this post before 11/06, there have been some major changes to the start up script. This new version is the most basic and easiest. This is a quick and dirty guide for installing Apache Tomcat 6.0.18 on CentOS5. It is based on detailed instructions for CentOS 4 and tomcat 6.0.13 here . If you get no luck, please check out this link for comprehensive explanation and adopt it to your platform. Install pre-requisite 1. Download java JDK 6 Update 10 and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 Update 10 bin ( NOT RPM ) 2. Open terminal, su to root and move downloaded files to /root directory $ su root Password: # mv [.....] 3. Create java environment # mkdir /usr/java # cd /usr/java 4. Execute downloaded jdk and jre bins. # sh /root/jre-6u10-linux-i586.bin # sh /root/jdk-6u10-linux-i586.bin 5. verify install # l