In my previous post I agonised for more than a week over trying to get CF8 Standard to run on my 64-bit server. Much of the issues I face were not because I was running on a unsupported distro, but simply because of licensing issues that forced me to shoehorn the 32-bit version of CF into a 64-bit distro. The 64-bit Enterprise version of CF installed without even a blip on the radar ... the way it's supposed to be. Below is a step by step record of the process i went through to get it going. (with short comments)

- downloaded coldfusion-801-lin.bin from Adobe
- re-upload it to the server (ftp site would have been handy)

- create CF user/group
$ adduser --group cfserver
$ adduser --ingroup cfserver cfserver

- add multiverse repository to sources list
$ nano /etc/apt/sources.list
(add)
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy multiverse

- install 32 bit JVM
$ apt-get install ia32-sun-java6-bin

(fixed cf installer error by generating en_US locale)
$ locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
$ /usr/sbin/update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

- run installer as root with -i console flag
$ ./coldfusion-801-lin.bin -i console

- start coldfusion
$ sh /opt/coldfusion8/bin/coldfusion start

Install 32-bit Apache
- remove old version of apache
$ apt-get remove apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-prefork-dev apache2-utils apache2.2-common libapr1 libapr1-dev libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dev

Download and compile apache
$ apt-get install build-essential (This is used for compiling the source)
$ apt-get install libc6-dev-i386( Installs 32 bit header files)
$ apt-get install gcc-multilib (install 32 bit gcc libraries)
$ export CFLAGS='-m32'
$ tar -xzf http httpd-2.2.9.tar.gz
$ cd httpd-2.2.9
$ ./configure
$ make clean
$ make
$ make install

- start apache
$ sh /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start
- modify apache config
$ nano /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf
- restart apache
$ sh /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart

Setup the coldfusion apache connector
$ nano /opt/coldfusion8/bin/connectors/apache_connector.sh
(edited to look like this)
===============================================================
#!/bin/sh

#
# Configure the Apache connector.
#    -dir should be the *directory* which contains httpd.conf
#    -bin should be the path to the apache *executable*
#    -script should be the path to the script which is used to
#        start/stop apache
#
../../runtime/bin/wsconfig \
    -server coldfusion \
        -ws apache \
    -dir /usr/local/apache2/conf \
    -bin /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd \
    -script /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl \
     -coldfusion \
    -ws32 -v

exit
==============================================================

- run the connector
$ sh /opt/coldfusion8/bin/connectors/apache_connector.sh

Setup Coldfusion and Apache daemons to run at startup

$ ln -s /opt/coldfusion8/bin/coldfusion /etc/init.d/coldfusion
$ update-rc.d coldfusion defaults

$ ln -s /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl
$ update-rc.d apachectl defaults

... and that as they say is that ... Bob is now my uncle. Big thanks again to Umal, Charlie and others for all your help!!