Before installing Kawa, you will need a working Java system. Kawa has been reported to work with JDK from 1.1 through 1.6.0-beta, Kaffe, Symantec Cafe, J++, and GCJ. The released Kawa jar file assumes some JDK 1.4 functionality. If those features are missing, you may need to build Kawa from source.
The discussion below assumes you are using the Java Developer's Kit (JDK) from Sun. You can download free copies of JDK 1.4 for various platforms.
If you want to run Kawa on a Macintosh, see http://rdsathene.org/scheme/mackawa.html.
The program java is the Java interpreter.
The program javac is the Java compiler,
and is needed if you want to compile the source release yourself.
Both programs must be in your PATH.
If you have the JDK in directory $JDK,
and you are using a Bourne-shell compatible shell
(/bin/sh, ksh, bash, and some others) you can set PATH thus:
PATH=$JDK/bin:$PATH export PATH