Nothings ever easy is it.  No...

So I'm following the tomcat installation guide for continuum over at http://continuum.apache.org/docs/1.3.1/installation/tomcat.html and i start continuum and in the catalina log files it says:

2009-02-06 16:47:00.205 GMT Thread[main,5,main] java.io.FileNotFoundException: derby.log (Permission denied)
2009-02-06 16:47:00.528 GMT Thread[main,5,main] Cleanup action starting
ERROR XBM0H: Directory /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina/database/continuum cannot be created.

An no amount of messing with the Java Security Manager (see previous blog posts) seems to help.  I even tried disabling it in the file /etc/default/tomcat5.5 but to no avail.

What did fix the issue for me, was this:

mkdir /var/lib/derby
chmod a+w /var/lib/derby

then I edited /etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 and added "-Dderby.system.home=/var/lib/derby" to my CATALINE_OPTS line so it read:

CATALINA_OPTS="-Dappserver.home=$CATALINA_HOME -Dappserver.base=$CATALINA_HOME -Dderby.system.home=/var/lib/derby"

And yes, i'll tighten up those permission later, once the damn thing works!

After that continuum could be started and accessed via it's web interface.

Hope this helps as it seems I'm the first person to run into this issue (or at least document it) as searching google for the error code or paths above (in relation to continuum, tomcat and debian) was somewhat futile.