[opencms-dev] OpenCMS install error (RH8+JDK1.4+Tomcat4.1)

[frank at noblepath.org]

I am getting the same error out of the box mentioned by
http://www.opencms.org/majordomo/opencms-dev/0210/msg00008.html
and http://www.opencms.org/majordomo/opencms-dev/0210/msg00007.html.

Except, when I copy the war over to webapps it did not automatically deploy
on restarting tomcat, however using deploytool got it up and running.
However, like the other occurences referenced above, when I clicked on the
ocsetup link, I received the show-stopper exception (lots and lots of
exception info lines deleted for sanities sake):

org.apache.jasper.JasperException
	at
org.apache.jasper.runtime.JspRuntimeLibrary.handleSetProperty(JspRuntimeLibrary.java:534)	at org.apache.jsp.index_jsp._jspService(index_jsp.java:59)

root cause:
java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException: java.lang.NullPointerException
	at com.opencms.boot.CmsSetup.setBasePath(CmsSetup.java:126)


I'm at a loss, I have tried off clues in another post to use jdk1.3 but that
didn't help, same exceptions were thrown.   I tried an older OpenCMS (4.6.1)
but that didn't change anything.

All of the tomcat tests of jsp and servlet functionality work fine.

CATALINA_OPSTS is set, JAVAHOME is set, etc.

This is straight RH8 install, apache is 2.0.40 (which is what comes with RH
now), Tomcat as it ships straight of RH install, MySQL is doing just fine
(and is current), been using it for lots of other stuff, the only
non-right-out-of-the-box experience is OpenCMS.

If you have a tip that might help, or better still a complete solution to
this problem, I'd love to hear it :)

Thanks in advance,
...Frankie