Another problem:
I tried manually downloading the JRE tarball from Oracle and installing w/ get-java 1.1. I chose the sfs option. It created an sfs, but it never worked.
I did try the immediate-use option, and also made sure it was selected for boot loading in Boot Manager. When it failed, I tried several times again by rebooting, but Java Control Panel never saw it as present.
Then I tried creating JRE as a .pet and loading with the Puppy package manager. This time it worked and Java Control Panel did see it. However several other of my programs stopped working.
I realized that the problem was that the Java Installer was installing to /opt/.
Because I run and test several puppies, I had long ago moved the opt folder to /mnt/home, and then I always link back to /. Apparently the Java Control Panel doesn't like this and overwrites the link with a new /opt/ folder, and installs JRE in that. Thus JRE works but my other apps in /mnt/home/opt don't.
However, I was able to move the /opt/ JRE contents over to /mnt/home/opt/, and then delete the /opt/ folder and make a new link back. And everything worked after that.
I suspect something similar happened when the sfs version failed to install in /mnt/home/opt/
