There are still some outstanding issues regarding JBoss Portal on JBoss AS 4.2, such as: http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPORTAL-1309 or http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPAPP-59 You said you want to evaluate JBoss Portal. In that case I'd suggest to follow the easy way to get started by downloading JBoss Portal 2.6.CR2 with embedded AS, as you might have done already, according to your first post. Try to start it up, it should work out-of-the-box with the embedded Hypersonic db. If this works you can go ahead and - install it on VPC and - switch the db to use something else then hsqldb View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4053830#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...