Well, following stripped down instructions provided by Jason Gilmore on searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com a little over a year ago, I downloaded OFBiz (from trunk using svn) and installed it on two virtual machines running Suse Linux (v 12.1): one using KDE and one using Gnome, if that matters.
The build process went smoothly, and took over half an hour on Suse+KDE, but only 17 minutes on Suse+Gnome (I can't explain why and both VMs are running on the same machine). But on each, I started it, after the build, using "./startofbiz.sh', and the program seems to never end (at least it never terminates and gets me back to the command prompt). Is it supposed to do that (i.e. go into a do-forever loop), or did something go awry without generating any error messages. I would have thought that it would have started OFBiz much like the sh scripts for Apache's httpd server just start the server and terminate; but that's not what happened. This holds for both virtual machines. If I open a browser and go to 'http://localhost:8080/ecommerce/control/main', I do get the demo store, and that seems to work OK, although I have barely begun to explore it. Thanks Ted
