Installing Drupal

Greets,

I have been learning the basics of Drupal 7.14 at work using MAMP 1.96. I am adding the feature module by downloading and installed into the module folder. When I enable feature and run cron, it wold give me these warnings.

Hi
For the past two days I've been trying to get drupal install script going. I have installed drupal on an apache webser on redhat 6.x. Apache and mysql are running. I've installed webmin and can access that through a browser. However, the drupal install script falls to run when I open a browser window to the server address! Any idea how I point to the install?
Many thanks
Dex

Hi all
managed to get a standard install working on my home box. Most things look good, but I've got two problems (which are probably related).

I get messages about auto-updating not working properly. I have set up an hourly cron job, and the admin says when it was run last, so that seems to be ok. When I go into certain sections of the admin panel (modules for instance), it tells me that the Core has not been updated.

The other problem relates to themes. The default settings on a theme seem to work no problem, but when I try to customise it (eg by switching to a different colour scheme provided by the theme author) the admin panel says settings were saved, and when I exit the admin panel the site looks like all the colours have been set to white, and the outlines of the elements (login box, title etc) are visible - sorta like a wireframe or skeleton of the site, if that makes sense.

Things I've done different:
Instead of using .htaccess, I created a new entry in httpd.conf pointing to where Drupal is installed, and copied the contents of .htaccess to this section of the file.
One of the instructions says to chmod the settings.php file to 640, but this caused problems (Drupal kept coming back to the install screen) so i changed it to 644.

I want a drupal distribution with Workbench & Workflow are setup. I found the Dru++ (http://drupal.org/project/druplusplus) as a matching one. By visiting to http://drupal.org/project/druplusplus, I can not get any downloads of distribution.

How can I download and install this distribution?

Create new database in sql server management studio(Drupal). Run installation drupal on iis 7.5. After enter Database type: Microsoft Sql Server, Database name: Drupal, Database Username: sa, Database Password:***** and Database Host: 192.168.22.127 give : Error messageWarning: htmlspecialchars(): Invalid multibyte sequence in argument in check_plain() (line 1587 of C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\acquiaSVN\includes\bootstrap.inc).
SQLSTATE[IMSSP]: An error occurred translating string for input param 3 to UCS-2.

How decide this error?

Warning: fopen(D:\www\.../sites/default/settings.php) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in drupal_rewrite_settings() (line 646 of D:\www\...\includes\install.inc).

How can I solve this problem? My website is on Microsoft Server IIS. I can't change CHMOD attribute in settings.php. Can I add my database name, username and password to settings.php manually??