Installing Drupal

I've installed Drupal on XAMPP. After a successful installation there is a warning: Failed to connect to mailserver at local host port 25, verify your SMTP... Of course email doesn't work. I have Mercury Mail on XAMPP, but SMTP is offline, and I can't find a way to configure it.

I finally got the DNS up on my LAMP to show "it works" when typing in domain name from outside source. I installed Drupal6 and have been familiarizing myself with the various pages and was ready to start configuring but my localhost still points to index.html. How do I get localhost to bring up the Drupal page instead of index.html? Thanks in advance for your help.

When I try to install Drupal 7 beta 1 in Xampp Windows 7 appears this error:

PDOException: SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'drupal.semaphore' doesn't exist: SELECT expire, value FROM {semaphore} WHERE name = :name; Array ( [:name] => variable_init ) in lock_may_be_available() (line 163 of C:\xampp\htdocs\drupal\includes\lock.inc).

Hello,

I've read almost all the documents regard multi-site, sharing users, sharing databases etc and can't seem to find the answer I am looking for (or too stupid to understand, you be the judge). I am setting up another site on an existing Drupal installation (a multi-site), there is one table I would like to share between the instances.

I'm not sure if using the same database with a prefix for the second site is a great idea.

1st route - Separate database, how do I access a table on the default sites database? I want to setup a view(s) using that database.

i have installed drupal using fantastico some days ago... but as per requirement i deleted drupal manually from cpanel..

but now i want drupal again..

and there is a problem.. i am unable to intall drupal using fantastico, i have uploaded drupal manually but there is problem installing manually also!!!

i m in big trouble... plz help..

I am trying to install drupal on a nearlyfreespeech.net

I am getting an error :-

Failed to connect to your MySQL database server. MySQL reports the following message: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2).

* Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
* Are you sure that you have typed the correct database hostname?
* Are you sure that the database server is running?

Any ideas?

thanks