So my free subscription finally expired...new one costs $75/yr. I decided to try one of the DVD's offered on E-Bay. Not happy. The price was right...$11.45, but the thing didn't work. The first problem is that it needs to run in an Oracle virtual machine. This isn't so bad, but the Oracle software supplied didn't install. Fortunately, the OVM software is distributed free on the web, so I was able to install the current version. This is probably a better idea than installing a huge software distribution (60G) from a questionable vendor.

Once the OVM was installed, the next problem was loading in the actual virtual machine. It comes on five disks, which need to be loaded and merged to create one OVA. One of the OVA split files was damaged, and couldn't even be read from the disk. Confused? Yeah, a little more complex that I expected.

The instructions ask that you contact the vendor directly for support, not through ebay. After an email was sent and a couple of days had passed with no answer, I went through e-bay to request a refund. I had to return the disks (shipping label supplied), and the refund was made promptly. Some business model.

Has anyone actually made this work? is there a better version around somewhere?