Installing Liferay on a MacBook Pro

I tried installing Liferay as described in the admin manual but it did not work!! Then I decided to do an another clean install. Then I noticed, I had a previous instal of Tomcat on my machine and some residual environment variables. Once I cleaned it up, everything worked like a charm. Here are the steps I took:

1. Download the liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1 and uncompress and inflate it into a directory.

2. cd to bin directory and issue ./startup.sh

thats it, the server stated. I was able to login to the lifray portal from a Safari browser http://localhost:8080.

Go to logs directory and tail the catalina.out and check out the logs, it should say "INFO: Server startup in 33424 ms" as an evidence that the server stated up.

Next step for me is to install a developer version of Liferay so I can start developing Portlets.