help with basic installation.

It sounds like you are entering a url and seeing the front page for drupal but when you click on a link you see a directory listing.
In sites/default there is a file called settings.php. The base url ($base_url) should probably be set to the url you used to access the front page.
So if you used something like http://www.example.com the setting would read

$base_url = 'http://www.example.com'

and if your url lookes somethine like http://www.example.com/drupal the the setting would read

$base_url = 'http://www.example.com/drupal';