When building jadetex under some TeX distributions, notably texmf as distributed with RedHat 6.0, you will get errors when trying to include french.sty. I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, but you can successfully complete the build by commenting out or deleting lines 79-81 of /usr/share/texmf/tex/french/base/french.sty.
When using jadetex, you may get fatal errors regarding memory limits. This is easy to fix when using texmf. Simply edit /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf and up the memory limit that is causing the problems. For example, I have set hash_pool to 50000 from its default of 0.
Good luck!