anyone experienced with setting up tomcat

ok, this is way too confusing.

I want to run and use tomcat to do Java Server pages on my hosting, they will soon provide me with the java compiler, I presume the lastest. I know others have this running on my hosting service.

So what to do I need to get it up and running, there seems to be many parts. most seem to be in the binaries for tomcat but is that all I need or is there something else.

Also what is this dist file verification with keys stuff? never done that before?

just download the tar.gz of tomcat and you will need to add three env variables to your profile or add them to the startup script. you'll need to be able to execute shell scripts to get tomcat to start.