Thanx for the help! I finally got it working.

It wasn't the /etc/profile stuff, it was the *.rpm! It would seem that alien couldn't handle it and the *.deb got mangled. So, I downloaded jdk-1_5_0-rc-linux-i586.bin (a self extracting installer) from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp instead of the *.rpm.bin and everything installed great!

Thanx again,
AJG