Installing Drupal

I tried to built a Drupal system to my Linux Mint. I haven't configured MySQL ever before so I got a problem. I don't know how to get access to the database as Drupal says that

In order for Drupal to work, and to continue with the installation process, you must resolve all issues reported below. For more help with configuring your database server, see the installation handbook. If you are unsure what any of this means you should probably contact your hosting provider.

Hi

I am trying to install the first site in a Drupal 6 multisite config. At the moment I have to access the site via a temporary URL. I have created a sites/realdomain.com subdir for my site specific modules and themes using the real domain name rather than the temporary URL. Unfortunately Drupal does not recognise the subdir as belonging to the site and only shows modules available from the sites/all/modules folder.

Is there is trick to get this to work ?

Thanks for any advice,

El B

My webhost has PHP 5.2.13... I realise this is a previous version to the one required by Drupal 7... but is there anything I can do about that? I would like to use Drupal 7.

My OS is Fedora 14 running level 5 boot to GUI. User is joecamel belonging to groups apache, root & mysql. After chown root:root -R /var/www/ & chmod -R 777 /var/www/ I am consistently getting permission denied from the Drupal installation script. I've installed Drupal before and I don't remember running in to this problem. Thanks for any input.

Are there any how to's to install a multi-site sub directory and NOT a sub-domain?
Perhaps a step by step.
I have searched but cant find anything. I've seen may posts and it works fine in 6, but no mater what I do I cant get it to work in 7.

Does the document "Checklist for migrating to a new server" cover the case of changing hostname within the same server? I have set up websites "example.com" (alias www.example.com) and "test.example.com" (alias www.test.example.com) as separate virtual hosts within the same configuration of Apache. Drupal is installed only on "test.example.com".