FWIW, I'm using Linux Mandrake 8.1, and Sun's
JRE 1.4.0 (3rd beta). I downloaded both the full installer and gzipped tarball. Neither would install nor run.

However, when I did "java" in a console prompt,
it reported Kaffe java 1.0.1, (instead of Sun's jre 1.4.0). At that time I had not added the PATH
for jre 1.4.0 to my /etc/profile.

I removed Kaffe, and added jre 1.4.0 to /etc/profile, and the installer ran without any
problems!

HTH

Elton Woo ;-)
Registered Linux User #193975.
<http://counter.li.org>