(On Slackware 12.2 at 2010-04-28)

Tomcat is available as package at www.slackpackages.net. Installing the package adds the user and group 'tomcat' with a user- and group ID of 8080. /etc/rc.d./rc.tomcat and /etc/profile.d/catalina.sh and catalina.csh, which creates the CATALINA_HOME env. var.

Tomcat is started with /etc/rc.d./rc.tomcat start. Make rc.tomcat runnable and enable autostart at power on by starting/stopping it with an entries in rc.local / rc.local_shutdown. (See comments in rc.tomcat)

After start you should see the default Tomcat home page at http://localhost:8080/ If not, check /usr/share/apache-tomcat/RUNNING.txt

The CATALINA_HOME env var points to /usr/share/apache-tomcat

Hypertext docs live in subdirs of $CATALINA_HOME/webapps. The default home page is $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/ROOT/index.html. It has pointers to Servlets Examples, JSP Examples and the Tomcat Documentation.

Static HTML can be served by simply creating a subdir in webapps and providing an index.html within that new dir. (Tried)