It might be just you!
I just tried all that, and was glad to see gappletviewer was there and a real app, help and all.
But it answered only with a long warning shout about running with no security manager, ending with instruction to enter 'c' or 'C' to continue, anything else to quit. It doesn't hear either 'c' or 'C' until you hit enter, then it ends with an "-sh 'c' no such command, leaving the gappletviewer call as a stopped job. I tried this many times, with combinations of pausing, and in one of them actually got a crash with an exception stack trace. All others had just that "no such command" ending. Could not find how to reproduce the stack trace ending.
Do you have a simple applet URL you know works? I was trying a rather aggressive one I know.
Would love to see this work!

You must run gappletviewer in xterrm. I had no problems with the "Press 'c' to continue" thing using my soft keyboard on my n800.

There are several samples at http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/index.html. So just run something simple like...

gappletviewer http://java.sun.com/applets/jdk/1.4/.../example1.html

I tried this with the clock example... It looks horrible! Nothing seems to get erased from the display, so the second hand and digital seconds display both leave their marks behind as they change.

Did I do something wrong?

I also had to install classpath-gtk to get it to work at all.

Ahh yes, you may need to install gtk too... thx!!!

As I mentioned, it looks to have some serious issues with many applets, so it is probably not very useful. I have personally uninstalled it all just because I am one of those freaks that likes to keep things clean... If I don't use it, then it gets removed. I was trying to get the java citrix client working (which is an applet), but it ended up being too slow. I was even running the applet locally right of the tablet. Functionally it seemed to work, but it was un-useable to do performance.

I more post my thoughts to say it is "possible", just needs more work. I would be interested to try PhoneME once that have a OS2008 port

You're always running Java applets locally; if it's embedded in a web page, the whole applet gets downloaded to a temporary location to run from...

Yes Benson, I agree, but the reason I mentioned it is because the version of gappletviewer in Jalimo's repository seems to have some issues downloading the remote libraries. I was just pointing out that I ran gappletviewer with the jars already on my tablet, and using the non-url method of running an applet.

I figure Jalimo is still early alpha and unusable until the basic examples that you point to actually work. In fact, I will now just use the clock example as my test. I will keep Jalimo on my system and update it as they update their repos, and I'll keep testing it with the clock.

But, as of this point, I would say it really isn't possible to run Java on the tablets.

k-dog,
Thanks, I got the clock displayed, and saw the same problems as qole: display not refreshed correctly, but hey it's a start! Also I left it running for a while, long enough for the whole face to get covered with second-hand lines, and it ended with an understandable msg: Malloc failed - aborting VM.

OK one friendly distinction.. We probably should NOT say "it really isn't possible to run Java on the tablets"... It should be "it really isn't possible to run Java APPLETS on the tablets". I haven't played with running java applications (non-applet) on the tablet yet.