I use Mandrake 8.0 with LimeWire and it all runs fine now. The trick is to install Sun's Java platfrom from http://java.sun.com
then u should get LimeWireOther.zip and run /usr/java/jre1.3.1/bin/java -classpath LimeWireOther.zip install
that will work normally, and then you can just run the binary as is (i.e. /*wherever you installed it*/LimeWire )
if that doesn't work, check that uncompress is in /usr/bin, if it is not, link gzip to it like: ln -s /usr/bin/gzip /usr/bin/uncompress and try again.