With a sick kid on the sofa, I thought I would give the SAKAI demo a try....

Uhm arrg...
Ah, it's actually working :-)
I have managed to install the demo SAKAI on my laptop...

If you are interested in giving it a try a number of tips:

The five or so readme's are a bit confusing:
The one is directed at the demo version, the other directed at the real Src code version.... Please SAKAI: only leave us simple non-system-admins with one Readme file. This is what I ended up doing:

First install JDK 1.4.2
you can find it at: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html.

Then set the two JAVA_HOME and Path environment variables. This is a lot less complicated than it looks. In Windows XP, you go to
Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables
(read the page on the SAKAI website for details).

Now download the code and install.

Go to the good old command prompt. Go to the sakai-demo directory and type: start-sakai.bat
(although there is an other readme in the package which tells you to start bin\catalina.bat ...)

Now open the browser and type: http://localhost:8080/portal
and hey presto: SAKAI 2.1.2 is up and running. No tweaking was required :-)

Now it is running it is time to have a nose about....