are other java programs running? i ask because i know from a friend of mine that he had problems with installing the vm under … i think it was debian or ubuntu … perhaps something went worng with your java installation.
i don’‘t realy know but i would recommend to search for smililar error-messages with google - i suppose you’'re not the only one having this problem in the whole wide world
I don’‘t know how much memory your RH9 base system uses, but I guess that it’‘s using 16 MB, so you’'d have 48 MB left for Openfire. If you are also running Apache with PHP or MySQL less memory will be free.
You can edit the start script and set there -Xms16m -Xmx48m (or lower) as JVM parameters. This will be fine if you have less than 25 users and may work even with 100 users. But with 60 MHz guaranteed it may take ages to start Openfire and every garbage collection of the JVM will take very long.