Not sure what the Tomcat install from the SuSE repo does, and what still needs to be done manually.
SuSE 11.1, fully patched
From the repo, the following modules were installed with their dependencies
Tomcat6
Tomcat6-webapps
Tomcat6-admin-webapps
Also, default Java modules are installed plus the devel module for openjdk1.6.
From another thread, I thought that maybe $CATALINA_HOME would be set to some default value? But, from a console no value is returned for $CATALINA_HOME.
Also, in the YAST System Runlevel applet, although autostart can be enabled and manually starting says is successful, the Tomcat does not autostart on bootup (no error I can find).
Since no one has responded and after further searching existing Forum posts to this date, I wonder if there are fundamental longstanding unaddressed issues with Tomcat6 on OpenSuSE.
I have experienced the same problems - I have installed Tomcat 6 in the usual way on OpenSuSE 11.1 and get “process dead” status. (AMD 2500; 2 Gig memory and very large HDD).
I have installed Tomcat (5.x etc.) on previous versions of SuSE over many years and have got everything working within 5 mins.
It seems that the tomcat6 startup script is broken, in that it blindly overwrites the setting of JAVA_HOME environment variable from /etc/tomcat6/tomcat6 with one in /etc/sysconfig/tomcat6 (which is by default blank - note the misleading comment in /etc/sysconfig/tomcat6)
To make tomcat6 start normally, edit /etc/sysconfig/tomcat6 and replace