I am trying to install Tomcat to test DB2 web services and I ran into several problems on my Fedora Core 5 server to start the Tomcat server.

This is how I solved this. I found this problem widely reported but very few instructions to solve the problem.

Install Tomcat:

# yum install tomcat5 tomcat5-webapps tomcat5-admin-webapps

Try to start tomcat

# service tomcat5 start

I noticed these errors.

Starting tomcat5: /usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Could not find commons-collections Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Could not find commons-logging-api Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Some detected jars were not found for this jvm
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Could not find xml-commons-apis Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Some detected jars were not found for this jvm
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Could not find commons-beanutils Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Could not find commons-digester Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Could not find commons-logging Java extension for this JVM
/usr/bin/rebuild-jar-repository: 
error: Some detected jars were not found for this jvm
find: warning: you have specified the -mindepth option 
after a non-option argument -type, 
but options are not positional (-mindepth affects tests 
specified before it as well as those specified after it).  
Please specify options before other arguments.

find: warning: you have specified the -maxdepth option 
after a non-option argument -type, but options are not 
positional (-maxdepth affects tests specified before 
it as well as those specified after it).  
Please specify options before other arguments.

Using CATALINA_BASE:   /usr/share/tomcat5
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /usr/share/tomcat5
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat5/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       
[  OK  ]

I checked each RPM install and noticed that even though the RPM was installed correctly but the jar files were missing. This might be due to the fact that I do a lot of install / uninstall of RPMs and somewhere things got broken.

# rpm -qa | grep -i jakarta-commons-logging

The above output shows that the jar file is installed in /usr/share/java/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar but this file was not there when I checked it.

So, I uninstalled the RPMs that were supposed to have valid JARs file and re-installed them using these commands.

# rpm --nodeps -e jakarta-commons-logging-1.0.4-2jpp_10fc
# yum install jakarta-commons-logging
# rpm -qil jakarta-commons-logging.x86_64 0:1.0.4-2jpp_10fc
# ls -l /usr/share/java/commons-logging-api-1.0.4.jar
# rpm -qa | grep jakarta-commons-digester.x86_64
# rpm -qa | grep jakarta-commons-digester
# rpm --nodeps -e jakarta-commons-digester-1.7-2jpp_10fc
# yum install jakarta-commons-digester
# rpm -qil jakarta-commons-digester
# ls -l /usr/share/java/commons-digester-1.7.jar
# rpm -qa | grep jakarta-commons-collections
# rpm --nodeps -e jakarta-commons-collections-3.1-2jpp_5fc
# yum install jakarta-commons-collections
# rpm -qa | grep jakarta-commons-beanutils
# rpm --nodeps -e jakarta-commons-beanutils-1.7.0-2jpp_6fc
# yum install jakarta-commons-beanutils

After above changes, the missing jar problem goes away but I see these warnings. I have no idea what these are.

# service tomcat5 start
Starting tomcat5: find: warning: you have specified the 
-mindepth option after a non-option argument -type, 
but options are not positional (-mindepth affects tests 
specified before it as well as those specified after it).  
Please specify options before other arguments.

find: warning: you have specified the -maxdepth option 
after a non-option argument -type, but options are not 
positional (-maxdepth affects tests specified before it 
as well as those specified after it).  Please specify options 
before other arguments.

Using CATALINA_BASE:   /usr/share/tomcat5
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /usr/share/tomcat5
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat5/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       
[  OK  ]