Installing Drupal

I have 4.6.3 installed in a fresh installation for betta testing. I had 4.5 installed for a few months as well.

I enabled the 4 standard themes that came with drupal.

I wanted to start customizing a theme, but when I select another theme, and save it in my account, I immediatly lose the header and menus, that is I am only left with the content page for viewing my account. This is handy so i can reset it to bluemarine and continue messing around with drupal in other areas.

This wasn't a problem with our old 4.5 installation, any ideas?

The TinyMCE module I downloaded for 4.6.3 (from the module project page) and installed on my test site has the following directory structure:

(../modules/tinymce)
---plugins(folder)
--------drupalimage(folder)
INSTALL.txt
LICENSE.txt

tinymce.module
tinymce.mysql
tinymce.pgsql

Another tinyMCE module that I installed locally has the following structure:

Handbooks on how to install, configure helps. I looking for solutions from handbook, forum, google very hard but the page still not work.

I can see the GUI default page in the local box but if I try on other machines, only plain text default Drupal page without graphic.

Please give newBie some REAL help

what should be the $base_url in settings.php ?????
$base_url = 'http://localhost';
OR $base_url = 'http://www.example.com';

I am getting a below error when i try to configure a new theme. I get the following error

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /www/modules/system.module on line 649

Any help will be appreciated.

I've installed drupal and things seem to be going well - except I can't get the first user created. When I click on the link, I get taken to the Apache default install page for my server.

Here's the URL it's trying to access:
http://10.1.1.2/?q=user/register

Here's the relevant entries from sites/default/settings.php
$db_url = 'mysql://drupal:fakepassword@10.1.1.2/drupal';
$db_prefix = '';

$base_url = 'http://10.1.1.2';

This is what it says when I try to upload something:

* The directory . is not writable.
* File copy failed: no directory configured, or it could not be accessed.
* The directory /files does not exist.

What does all this mean. I put the folder, /files in the main directory, public_html/files.