"You're wasting time trying to use RMAN to duplicate across OS."

Thats helpful advice, dont want to waste my weekend.

I was hoping to do a quick and dirty restore of the files to my machine since the backups are only 2 GB, not for the purpose of cloning just to see if the backup set is reliable.

I will have to do this on another sun box monday, unless clio_usa has actually done it cross platform.

clio_usa?