I was reinstalling some old system on new O/S.. CentOS release 5.4 (Final)

before this I think was older version.

After few time restarting Geoserver , no luck..
I tried the manual run of the script as follows :

 export JAVA_HOME=$JHOME; export GEOSERVER_HOME=/opt/geoserver;export GEOSERVER_DATA_DIR=/opt/geos_shapefiles; /bin/sh $GEOSERVER_HOME/bin/startup.sh  > /dev/null  2>1&

it complaining something about java.. then I remembered last time,
there is not using default java shipped with CentOS.

Did a quick check and remove that one..

  rpm -qa | grep java
  yum remove java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0-1.2.b09.el5

followed by reinstallation of packages of old version of java..

rpm -Uvh java-1.6.0-sun-* libXp-1.0.0-8.1.el5.i386.rpm

restarting ..

service geoserver restart

and it works !

so , stick to old ones..