Installing Drupal

I'm not I'm describing this right but I just installed drupal on a debian gnu/linux box with postgresql and when I'm logged in a user everything works fine but when an Anonymous User tries to view the frontpage the content (first article) has a title of "Access denied" with messaging body "You are not authorized to access this page."

Users are unable to change their passwords, and I cannot change a user's role from the administration. I submit the change, and it seems to ignore it. No error messages.

One of the features I love with Drupal 4.2.0-rc is the calendar now only has an active link on the days there is new content. I've just moved my Drupal site back to my webhost that the server is in an Australian Timezone, but I'm located in Colorado, USA (MDT). I noticed tonight that when I entered my blog entry, that the calendar has tomorrow (the 19th) with a link on it, but when I look at the entry it shows a timestamp of tonight (the 18th) due to my personal settings. I'm guessing this is due to the server being in an AU timezone is the cause for this.

I get this 405 message after an install when I try to login in for the first time (create admin).

NOTE: I have added the line:
Options FollowSymLinks -Indexes
to my .htaccess file (I'm running on a hosted site and it seems to need this).

Any ideas as to what I've done wrong would be appreciated.

Cheers!

Is there a way for an author or admin to add a story and have it remain "unposted" untill he/she or others are finished editing it with a time limit setting?

Please forgive my abject ignorance, but I'm an old-old-old-school programmer who knows virtually nothing about PHP (and even less about MySQL), other than the fact that I've been able to install and use several PHP/MySQL-based packages (e.g., PHP-Nuke) successfully.

I _think_ Drupal may offer what I really want (i.e., a community blog portal) without all the extraneous garbage of PHP-Nuke, but I've run smack up against a brick wall already. I swear, I've read all the docs, searched these forums, and Googled the problem until my eyes are ready to bleed, and can't find the solution.

Here's the error when trying to run index.php (or index.php?q=admin):

Fatal error: Table 'globalblogs.variable' doesn't exist query: SELECT * FROM variable in /absolutepathto/drupal/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 75

(where "globalblogs" is the correct name of the MySQL database, and "absolutepathto" represents the correct path to Drupal)

I have a working MySQL database in place, but beyond that...

Am I supposed to create a new table?

Does there exist any sort of automatic installation program that will create whatever Drupal needs in MySQL (like nukesql.php for PHP-Nuke)?

Is there a truly step-by-step bonehead guide to installation somewhere?

Yes, this line:

$db_url = "mysql://mysqldatabasename:mysqlpassword@localhost/globalblogs";

...in conf.php contains the correct variables.