Installing Drupal

I recently had an enforced 4 month break from the content management of my public Drupal server. This was due to hospitalisation as a result of a road accident on bicycle in which I suffered a severe head injury. Although doctors are expecting the effects of the injury not to last, they have have probably affected my ability to deal with the very complex tasks necessary to get a proper live testbed Drupal server working on my Linux Desktop system. (This is not my preferred environment, BTW. I would prefer a testbed on a physical host separate to my desktop computer, but circumstances, including the cumbersome "Local Area Network" connected to Telstra's ADSL Bigpond Network, has forced me to use to try to use this less-than-ideal setup.)

(To explain my circumstances, I will include, further below, part of an e-mail I sent to a friend.)

Can anyone tell me where there are full instructions of how to set up a drupal web-server on my desktop? I need details how to configure Apache and Mysql as well as Drupal (version 5.x or, better still, version 6.x). Whilst there are pages which do explain this in more general terms, they seem to lack documentation of much of the necessary configuration options for Drupal, Mysql and Apache.

Just installed drupal 6.19 fresh install, and gave guests the permission to create blog entries. Then I go to the site as a guest and under "Create Content" there is no option to create a blog entry, but other types do exist. When I visit the "Blog" page (/blog) I do see the button that says "Create Blog Entry", so the permission definitely worked, but when I click on it I get an "Access Denied" message. Removing the permission to post blog entries does get rid of the "Create blog entry" button.

I'm trying to run a exciting site on my localhost (using xampp). The option compress css/js files is turned on but for some reason it is looking for those files in the root drupal directory instead of sites/default/files/css. When I copy the compressed css files in the root /css directory it works (except for the image locations -.-). When the compressed files are not in the root/css folder, the sites gets in a never ending loop because it cannot find the css files or something.

I am creating a web development setup using Ubuntu 10.04. I have a workstation running Ubuntu 10.04 on which I have installed the LAMP stack. I want to store the drupal files on a separate dedicated file server with RAID for safety (also running Ubuntu 10.04). The file server is configured using SMB/CIFS shares so that I can attach Windows PC and MAC to the file server for testing and universal access.

I have been developing a site on GoDaddy shared hosting and am trying to move the installation over to a virtual dedicated server. I moved all the files, dumped the database using backup-migrate, and imported it on the new server using phpmyadmin. I also updated settings.php as needed (I've been through this process before and had no issues). When I try to access the site, I am presented with a blank page. The only page I seem to be able to actually render is the install.php page, which says that drupal is already installed etc... Any ideas what could be causing this?

Moved drupal 6 site from local wamp server to Network Solutions via ftp+bigdump; home page loads, but get PAGE NOT FOUND others? I am a newbie here. I have loaded other drupal sites on GoDaddy successfully. Any ideas what might be going wrong here? If I am posting to the wrong forum, let me know where I should post. Thanks in advance for any insight you might have. I am doing this for a friend for free for her start up business. www.tellotech.com.