CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I have Ubuntu 10.10 installed. The Drupal Installation Guide on wiki.civicrm.org gets me really confused; I have been frustrated for a long time with this, but I had not taken the time to butt my head against it for most of a day, so I did not ask before. I have really high hopes for using CiviCRM (took the L.A. training in ~ August) but I cannot get anywhere with the first steps. I quote the difficult parts of Drupal Installation Guide, and give my responses in CAPS:

"Path for Drupal
"The rest of these instructions assume that you have Drupal installed in /var/www/drupal. Adjust paths as needed."

DRUPAL (I SUPPOSE YOU MEAN THE APPLICATION) IS NOT IN /var/www/; ONLY index.html IS THERE, THE DEFAULT WEB PAGE FOR THE SERVER. SHOULD USERS FIND THE PATH BY "locate" COMMAND?

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"Verify Drupal Database Settings

"You will need to know the database settings for your Drupal installation prior to running the CiviCRM installer:

"You can look up these values in your Drupal settings.php file (located by default in your <drupal_root>/sites/default directory)

"$db_url = 'mysql://dbuser:dbpassword@localhost/drupal';"
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THIS IS A BIT CONFUSING; IN UBUNTU DRUPAL IS IN:  /usr/share/drupal6/  OR /etc/drupal/6/

THEN, IN EITHER LOCATION'S settings.php FILE, THE LINE IS:

* Database URL format:
*   $db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename';

THIS IS SO COMPLETELY GENERIC (BESIDES APPEARING TO BE A COMMENT) THAT IT SEEMS MEANINGLESS IN THIS CONTEXT. SOME GUIDANCE FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME? ARE YOU ASSUMING THAT, BESIDES  HAVING DRUPAL INSTALLED, IT ALSO HAS ALREADY BEEN CONFIGURED AND IS BEING USED FOR SOMETHING?

Most Drupal installs are manual thus the user knows what the path is.

The database settings you see mean that Drupal has not yet been installed. Once it's installed, those will change to be the actual details to connect to your database.