Maven Maven and Maven

I have been battling with installing maven for my new project....now this thing has been showing me hell. I downloaded all the stuff, and the atlassian pdk.
Now I followed all the instructions they had on their page, for some reason, they prefered to use jdk 1.4, but for me, that didnt matter anyways.
So I did all the exporting environmental variables, got the thing to work, created the maven archetype(Directory skeleton for a particular kind of project).
Now I had a full screen(Oh did I mention I got a new phillips flat screen yesterday?), filled with weird looking linux commmands...then since I Wasnt going to kill myself, I exported the whole thing into my eclipse IDE with the command eclipse:eclipse.......this frigging download took 29 mins approximately. When I was rejoicing that it had finally worked, came the hard part, getting eclipse to compile and build this thing.
Maven uses a test/development life cycle method. The first stage is compile, then some tests, and then an install. These stages are called "goals" in maven terminology.
I wasnt making any progress, so I installed the maven plug in for eclipse. Now I began suffering because for maven to compile, it needs to download all the dependencies from the local maven repository(29 minute download...remember?), and if it doesn't see what it wants, it begins to bitch like a starving cat.
I got so many errors. imagine getting an error called mojo:ActionMojo:execute, or some crap like that...reminds me of a friend in school who saw a line of code commented as "suicide".
Now I have been trying to get this to work all day with no avail. Now its hinting that one of the POMS for the dependencies its trying to download is faulty. Mavens proponents say its better than ant, but for some reason, I find that doubtful.
Anyways, back to the grind...this thing must and will work, if I have to beat it with a stick...

In case anyone sees this, this is an example of some of the crap eclipse feeds me:

2/19/08 4:27:46 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'seraph:seraph:pom:0.7.17:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project seraph:seraph at /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom
2/19/08 4:27:50 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'oscore:oscore:pom:2.1.0:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project oscore:oscore at /home/ade/.m2/repository/oscore/oscore/2.1.0/oscore-2.1.0.pom
2/19/08 4:27:50 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner:pom:8Aug07:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner at /home/ade/.m2/repository/cargo-test-runner/cargo-test-runner/8Aug07/cargo-test-runner-8Aug07.pom
2/19/08 4:28:14 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'seraph:seraph:pom:0.7.17:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project seraph:seraph at /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom
2/19/08 4:28:25 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'oscore:oscore:pom:2.1.0:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project oscore:oscore at /home/ade/.m2/repository/oscore/oscore/2.1.0/oscore-2.1.0.pom
2/19/08 4:28:27 PM CET: [WARN] POM for 'cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner:pom:8Aug07:provided' is invalid. It will be ignored for artifact resolution. Reason: Not a v4.0.0 POM. for project cargo-test-runner:cargo-test-runner at /home/ade/.m2/repository/cargo-test-runner/cargo-test-runner/8Aug07/cargo-test-runner-8Aug07.pom
2/19/08 4:28:30 PM CET: Parsing error /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom; org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.pull.XmlPullParserException: Unrecognised tag: 'logo' (position: START_TAG seen ...\n ... @9:11)
2/19/08 4:28:30 PM CET: Unable to read search-portlet/pom.xml; org.eclipse.core.runtime.CoreException: Parsing error /home/ade/.m2/repository/seraph/seraph/0.7.17/seraph-0.7.17.pom; org.codehaus.plexus.util.xml.pull.XmlPullParserException: Unrecognised tag: 'logo' (position: START_TAG seen ...\n ... @9:11)

Do I sound pissed off? You bet I am.... :-)