Hi, other Unregistered!
I've just found this post looking for help with my similar problems with Mandrake 8. I still can't get the .bin LimeWire to work, but thanks to the pointers on here I got the java version working.

I'm using Blackdown Java, not Sun, but the problem was still that Linux was looking in the wrong place for java.

'whereis java' at a terminal will probably display: 'java: /usr/bin/java'
If so, this fix should work for you. First find precisely where java is in your new java path - might be further down the path than /usr/local/jre1.3.1.
Delete /usr/bin/java and replace with a symbolic link pointing to your new java (ln -s /usr/local/jre1.3.1/somemorepathmaybe/java /usr/bin/java).

And that might well make 'java -classpath LimeWire.zip install' work.