Which packages of Felix do I need to get started? There are a zillion of them on the downloads page.
(p.s. is the name a reference to the Odd Couple + in contrast to OSGI's "Oscar" reference framework? this occurred to me after reading one of the tutorial pages & I got a chuckle out of it.)
Actually this depends on what you are going to achieve. You can start with main Felix distribution, it already contains OSGi Bundle Repository implementation, so you will be able to download and start other Felix bundles.
Contrary, you can download and run Felix (or other OSGi implementations) using Pax Runner, you can control which sets of OSGi bundles to run easily.
There is also a way to start Felix with ServiceMix Kernel (called Karaf), it is based on Felix, but contains more bundles and supports hot deployment
You just need to download the "main" distribution at:
http://apache.mirror.clusters.cc/felix/felix-1.8.0.tar.gz
(it is the first download link)
Unzip it, enter in the felix-1.8.0 directory and type
$ java -jar bin/felix.jar
The Felix console will appear, type "help" to get started
Felix main (the System bundle - level 0) will always be there & active. For the rest it can be completely random, but there's the compendium bundles which are there for convenience purposes. The compendium bundles were defined by the OSGi alliance as part of the R4 spec.
I'm also new on OSGi. I found this page quite helpful on different ways of using Felix. it shows that you don't need to use any 'compendium' or other bundles.
Personally i like 'Declarative Services' compendium bundle (called SCR like in org.apache.felix.scr-1.0.8.jar) it makes true service architecture possible. There's also iPOJO, spring-DM etc. but its DS for me
You can read about compendium bundles in the OSGI R4 spec.