Just in case anyone else gets hit by this, it turned out that installing openjdk on Suse gives you NLY the JRE (alas, when I worked with Java in the past, one could choose between a JRE file, named as such, and a JDK file - now, at least with the Suse distro, they're both called JDK, but the actual JDK has the string 'devel' appended). Also, gcj was installed as part of the Gnu compiler collection, and that gives you java 1.5. I found and installed openjdk-devel, and that gives me the javac for the jdk, among other things. Installing that solves the problem, and now ofbiz built and runs fine on Suse12.3 with JDK 1.7.
The problem, in this case, wasn't a peculiarity of ant, but rather a confusing naming scheme for latest JDKs on Suse. Cheers Ted
