Installing Drupal

I installed the image module and when I upload an image I get this error message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted at (null):0 (tried to allocate 768 bytes) in /home/virtual/site24/fst/var/www/html/includes/image.inc on line 284

I read all post regarding this issue.

- I added the line
memory_limit = 32M
to /etc/php.ini

and added line
ini_set("memory_limit","32M");
to /index.php

Sure I also restarted Apache.

But this all did not solve my problem.

I will try to be succinct here. Please don't shoot the newbie!
My Problem
When I open the screen to install Drupal, I am presented with the following:

Install on Domain: Liquidconfusion.net (there as default)
Install In Directory: (blank--I am to enter something here or leave it blank) This is where I get confused.

Right beneath the directory box is the following script:
"Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain (access example: http://domain/).Enter only the directory name to install in a directory (for http://domain/name/ enter name only). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created!"

Lastly, I am asked to enter my admin username and password.

What Happens
I get a message that states the following:
"The installation can not be completed:

- You chose to install in the main directory of the domain liquidconfusion.net, but there are conflicting filenames, therefore we can not proceed. Following filenames already exist in the main directory of the domain liquidconfusion.net (path="/home/liquidco/public_html/").You must manually remove these files before proceeding with auto-installation:
.htaccess"

My Question is what to enter in the "Install in directory" box. I don't want to tell it the wrong directory and if I am to leave it empty, that's great. The other problem is the .htaccess file. Is that a necessary file, since this domain is hosted under my brother-in-law's account? I didn't want to delete it without getting advice first. If this is all that prevents me from installing Drupal, then I will delete it. Thanks you in advance for all your help! :)

I'm attempting to setup a drupal site, but when I try to launch the site for the first time, I get a blank page with only one line: "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)." I'm a newbie at this, so the problem might be something simple. I would appreciate any insight that anyone might have. The site is on a shared server running Apache 1.3 (Ithink), mySQL 4 and PHP 4. I've loaded the database and edited settings.php.

I'm installing Drupal 4.6 for the first time and it seems pretty straightfoward.
I've installed everything as per the installation instructions and got Drupal to connect to mySQL database no prob.
I typed in my URL and got the wonderful "Welcome to your new Drupal-powered website...etc." shows up.

However...
None of the links on the page work! (besides the drupal.org links)
when I click "create first account" (or any other links) it simply sends me to some BS portal page from my host.

Hi

I have email working, at least for some addresses. This led me to believe something in the message
is stopping my emails from getting to certain other addresses. I have an Ubuntu box, 4.7-beta4 and Sendmail
installed.

I checked my mail.log and emails are from www-data@localhost.localdomain. I think this might be the problem? I changed
the site email address on the settings page but it doesn't affect this.

I checked my php.ini file and it has

Ok, I just finished a drupal site, it took me two months to learn drupal AND create a nice real estate site. I purchased a virtual dedicated server from godaddy with plesk. I am new to linux and the server has Fedora Core 2.

I have two problems:
1) I created my own gallery feature on the site. The problem I get is uploading the picture. It seems like php(drupal) can't copy the image from the /tmp/phpXXXXX location to my desired folder location. I get these errors: