Newbie question

[Daniele Lugli]

I recently downloaded jdk1.1.5v7 and untarred it into /usr/jdk1.1.5.
My CLASSPATH is .:/usr/jdk1.1.5/lib/classes.zip. JAVA_HOME is
/usr/jdk1.1.5, the same as JDK_HOME.
Then I wrote a wonderful HelloWorld.java (I won't explain you what it is
doing) and tried 

javac HelloWorld.java

getting:

...
Failed to open object 'HelloWorld/java'

Yes, with a slash instead of the dot. Why?
I am using Red Hat 5.0 and my shell is bash.

Thank you in advance for any help and best regards.

Daniele Lugli