Okdeki - progress (of sorts).
Installed ide on windows-7 laptop.
Plugged in card and the drivers configured without me having to do anything - downloaded modified blink and all worked perfectly.
Went back to ebay and notice that some of the clone boards are UNO's - with the ch340 chip. They give a link to two sites one of which has OSX drivers - (It is is Russia and I had a little twitchiness.......)
Installed that driver (from: Модуль CH340G. Переходник USB COM TTL (RS232).) and had a port configured.
Still have one issue in that I get the following when I send a sketch to the board - but serious progress is being made.
BTW - as A test I ran the serial monitor - when I type random crud and send it to the Mega clone, I get the serial lights to flash - so basic comms is occurring!
Actually looking at the messages, I think the issue is that because the device name has an imbedded space, AVRdude goes nuts!
The actual device is: /dev/tty.wch ch341 USB=>RS232 fa1240
Stan
Arduino: 1.5.7 (Mac OS X), Board: "Arduino Mega or Mega 2560, ATmega2560 (Mega 2560)"
Sketch uses 1,518 bytes (0%) of program storage space. Maximum is 258,048 bytes.
Global variables use 9 bytes (0%) of dynamic memory, leaving 8,183 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 8,192 bytes.
avrdude: ser_open(): can't open device "/dev/tty.wch": No such file or directory
ioctl("TIOCMGET"): Inappropriate ioctl for device
ioctl("TIOCMGET"): Inappropriate ioctl for device
avrdude: ser_send(): write error: Bad file descriptor
This report would have more information with
"Show verbose output during compilation"
enabled in File > Preferences.