Installing Drupal

Hi, I am new to Drupal - and almost new to Apache, MySQL and PHP as well.

Finished creating Drupal database in MySQL, also tested database access with a few PHP scripts.

Now I am stuck when trying to connect to Drupal site - step 4 in the Drupal installation guide:

> 4. CONNECTING DRUPAL
>
> The default configuration can be found in the
> 'sites/default/settings.php' file within your Drupal installation.
> Before you can run Drupal, you must set the database URL and the
> base URL to the web site. Open the configuration file and edit the
> $db_url line to match the database defined in the previous steps:

> $db_url = "mysql://username:password@localhost/database";

> where 'username', 'password', 'localhost' and 'database' are the
> username, password, host and database name for your set up.

> Set $base_url to match the address to your Drupal site:

> $base_url = "http://localhost";

I have unziped all drupal file under "C:\\www" folder with their orginal folder structure

I have also modified the following directives in apache.conf:

DocumentRoot "C:/www"

Now when I open http://localhost in the browser, the folder stucture of unzipped Drupal download show up, i.e.

CHANGELOG.txt 13-Dec-2005 01:09 20K
INSTALL.txt 23-Apr-2005 13:07 10K
LICENSE.txt 16-Sep-2004 04:48 18K

I get this error

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: realpath() in /data/1/0/9/69/9884/user/11239/htdocs/includes/file.inc on line 192

under numerous circumstances and my host tells me the realpath function in PHP is not enabled for performance reasons. Should I just quit now and move the site to a host I know works properly for Drupal? I don't want to have to "work around" my host's constraints. I just want my host to support what I want to do, which is run Drupal out of the box.

thanks

I have had drupal awhile but got lazy and haven't done anything with it, i've been trying ot change the default theme and no luck. No matter which button i select under default it always goes back to pushbutton. I even tried removing pushbutton, but then it still wouldn't wokr and my page looked messed up so had to put it back. any ideas why this would happen? I also loaded the phptemplate engine in my themes/engine directory, what is that supposed to do? anything?

when i type http://www.kahpeng.com/drupal, i get the msg as below...

Fatal error: Table 'kahpeng_drupal.users' doesn't exist query: SELECT u.*, s.* FROM users u INNER JOIN sessions s ON u.uid = s.uid WHERE s.sid = '33f08ee46156a0b947f5f17c548000a3' AND u.status < 3 LIMIT 0, 1 in /home/kahpeng/public_html/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 66

any idea i getting the error msg as above ? help/guide needed pls, thx in advance

I just installed Drupal in a folder below my site folder on a Unix server that is hosted. My site is gg.com (abbreviated) and it is in a folder called gg on the server. I installed Drupal in a folder below gg/ called drupal-4.6.5/. Do if you go to gg.com with a browser nothing, because the index.php is in gg.com/drupal-4.6.5 If I point the browser to gg.com/drupal-4.6.5/index.php everything works great. So now I just need to get it working from the gg.com URL. If the answer involves htaccess there is a futher complication.

I get an internal server error installing drupal, after checking the forum I deleted the folowing lines.
No it works but I am not shure what function will maybe not work lather on?

# Set some options.
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks

# Set the default handler.
DirectoryIndex index.php

Daniel