If it could help: I've a redhat 5.0, the libc version of jdk115v7 seems to work properly. In order to get also the glibc version to work, i have installed the glibc RPM unpgrade, from the red hat site. I installed it with the command rpm -U. After this, my jdk works perfectly , even if I only use the JVM and not the javac. I didn't need to add any CLASSPATH.