That's the typical SuSE-problem you are experiencing, for SuSE will install multiple java runtime environments by default and the default environment it will use is 1.1.8.

What the Interpreter tells you, is that it hasn't found the basic class libraries (usually the file rt.jar or classes.zip for jre1.1.8) what you can do is, give the full path of that file with the -classpath option or you could do what I did (which is not a very clean way to solve the problem): I created a a symlink named "java" in /usr/bin pointing to /usr/lib/jdk1.3.1/jre/bin/.java_wrapper so if I typed in "java" it would use the jre1.3.1 by default (I do not care why things work, as long as they DO work).