Newbie query - installation problem

[peter burden]

Hello,
     Decided to give 'nutch' a go so downloaded nutch-0.9.tar.gz
      gunzipp'd OK but "tar xf nutch-0.9.tar" gave the message

tar: A lone zero block at 177559

    Proceeded and tried to run - not too surprisingly it couldn't
    load the 'admin' class.

nutch admin db -create
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: admin

    Any suggestions?

    Running SuSE LINUX 10.2
    tar --version says

tar (GNU tar) 1.15.1