Installing Drupal

I'm a crusty veteran *nix sysadmin, trying to install Drupal for the first time, and getting some strange and unhelpful errors. Here's what's up so far:

• Debian sid/wheezy, with drupal 7.14 package installed. (There is no 7.15 package yet.)
• Webserver is nginx, which I realize isn't officially supported yet, but has plenty of support and instructions out there. I'm currently following the setup at http://wiki.nginx.org/Drupal as a starting point.
• MySQL 5.5.24
• Lots and lots of coffee and Googling.

(Before installing Drupal7, I had the webserver serving static pages, then added FastCGI and testing it by viewing its generated status page. So those parts work.)

I've been following the instructions at http://drupal.org/documentation/install/beginners as best I can. D7 is in place, the distributed "settings.php" and "sites/default" have the correct permissions and ownership. The package install created a MySQL user and database, which I've verified. Then I pointed the browser at "http://the_local_ip_address/" to continue the installation, and this shows up in the logs:

I notice in the status report that Temporary directory is set to: sites/default/files/tmp but the install routine did not create this directory. Should I set this temporary directory to a different location of do I just create this /tmp in the location specified, what permissions should I give it 0777?

When I try to run the install script it seems to be working fine until I get to "Install Profile" Then I get the following warning in a red box at the top of the page. I've tried giving the IIS_USRS account increasingly greater access to \sites\default and the settings.php file, yet I still get this error. Can anyone suggest what I doing wrong here? Is this being caused by another account, perhaps?

Thank you, Paul

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my website path http://xxxx.com/sites will showing all the index files,
when i change the sites folder permission from 777 to 666,
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How to solve this problem?

Hi All,

I have install php 5.2.14 on my Linux server.While Installing Drupal 7 status report shows that "Drupal requires you to enable the PHP extensions in the following list (see the system requirements page for more information):gd";
I have searched a lot but not getting any output.
I have to recompile php with gd extension. Commands like yum, apt are not working on my server.
I have downloaded php5-gd-5.3.8-4.9.2.i586.rpm package but while installing same i am getting error like