On 2006-12, I (Dave Allen Barker Jr) installed Drupal for my first time. This was my experience.

Versions

Drupal

5.0 beta 2

Web Server

Apache 2.2.3

PHP

5.2.0

Database

MySQL Community Server 5.0.27

Host

Debian testing 2006-12 (almost etch)

Procedure

Get Drupal

Unfortunately, Drupal was not packaged for Debian a the time, so I:

1. Downloaded the tarball from Drupal
2. Unpacked the tarball (tar -xzf tarball)

Install Requirements

Drupal's INSTALL.txt specifies its requirements, of which all were available as Debian packages. This made installation as easy as:

1. aptitude install apache2 php5 php5-mysql mysql-server

Create the Database

Specific instructions are provided in Drupal's INSTALL.mysql.txt. I chose the following names:

databasename

620drupal

username

620

Note: I began with a database name of 620-drupal but later learned its dash (-) was the reason why the command to set the access database rights was failing me. I also learned that one way to fix the command in MySQL was to escape the database name with backticks (`620-drupal`). This made me nervous, and not wanting to trust that all other programs accessing the database would properly escape my dash laden database name, I removed the dash.