Using a download management tool

Given the fact that the download files are huge (from several hundreds of megabytes to more than 1.5 gigabytes), the probability of losing our Internet connectivity during the download and therefore having to restart the download is relatively high. In order to avoid this kind of trouble, we should use a download management tool of our choice.

The author (who is not related to the authors of the following software) has used the open-source tool named Free Download Manager (FDM) available at http://freedownloadmanager.org. An especially nice feature of FDM is its ability to read the file listing of .zip archives and to allow selecting or unselecting certain files within the archive, resulting in a smaller download size. The following screenshot shows the ZIP Preview feature of Free Download Manager:

We can see the content of the zip archive for the Siebel Business Applications 8.1.1.0 Base Applications (Part 1 of 2) with the Visual Mining Netcharts installer unselected.

However, if we are in doubt we should download the entire zip archive and store all downloaded archives in a single directory on our hard drive.

Once all zip archives are downloaded, we need to unzip them using our utility of choice. Oracle recommends using the unzip utility on UNIX-based operating systems and warns of using the built-in unzip feature of Microsoft Windows or the commercial WinZip software.

The author has successfully unzipped all downloaded files with 7zip, an open-source utility available at http://www.7-zip.org.

We can simply unzip all downloaded zip archives into a single directory. The following screenshot shows the result of unzipping the downloaded zip files, a set of jar archives and the files for the Siebel Image Creator:

Note

If you wish to continue following along with the installation of a Siebel CRM demonstration system, your task is now to download and unzip the Siebel installation archives as described in the above section.