I downloaded the tarfile for Linux (SLED 10). It failed to find a suitable JRE out of the box, even though the tarfile includes a JRE.
I believe this is because the included JRE does not include the server directory, so when you try to run Spark/jre/bin/java -version, you get an error like:
Error: no server'' JVM at/home/ghudson/Spark/jre/lib/i386/server/libjvm.so’’.
I modified the startup script to test JREs using the -client option, like so:
version_output="$bin_dir/java" -client -version 2>&1
and Spark started up fine.