There's an RPM version of Catalina Tomcat that makes installation easy, but it has a few caveats.
1. It doesn't run. They didn't include the standard demo apps
2. Someone switched the default port to 8180 in the server.xml file,
When I say "It doesn't run", I mean that you have to configure server.xml and plunk in your own webapps. Then it runs fine.
Their preferred installation path is /var/tomcat4, which I guess tracks the newer standard of placing HTML stuff in /var/www, as opposed to someplace like /var/home/httpd. Tomcat doesn't care, as long as its environment variables are set correctly.
On Red Hat, the easy way to restart Apache is:
/sbin/service httpd restart
For the RPM Tomcat, the service name is "tomcat4".
For non-RedHat systems, check for a local equivalent to the Red Hat "service" utility or do it the hard way and manually send a signal. The useful thing about the "service" command is that it executes a script in /etc/init.d (aka /etc/rc.d/init.d) that not only starts/stops/restarts, but also tracks to make sure you don't accidentally start multiple copies. Plus, of course, the syntax is the same for all subsystems -- which is more than you will be able to say about direct subsystem control!