After I wrote a Java application in JDK 1.6, I was stuck for a while when I realised that the target deployment machine was Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. RHEL4 does not support Java 1.6 in its default configuration.
Luckily I found this article on the CentOS wiki which included instructions on how to install Java 1.6 on CentOS 4. Remembering that RHEL4 and CentOS 4 are almost identical, I tried the method supplied, and it worked. This is the page with the method:
DavidCraddock.net 