First, I'll say that I solved the immediate problem.
Far below is what I was originally going to post, but I thought I would research this problem a little more. I found "Troubleshooting Blank Page" in the Wiki. If I only did that first!
What I discovered by turning on debugging in MySQL was that Smarty was not able to write in the directories cache, templates_c, etc. Now I know that I changed the permissions beforehand or I never would have gotten past the first couple of install pages. Right? After reading the debug info, I went back to check the directory permissions and sure enough they had changed to 400, along with mainfile.php. So I changed the 3 directories to 777 and mainfile to 444. Viola! Works like a charm now. Didn't even have to re-install.
So now the question is, what caused the permissions to change?! Is there possibly a bug in the install scripts that coincidentally found a flaw in my system?
I have a symlink in my home directory pointing to /srv/www/htdocs. Of course permissions are set to allow me to write into anything else there. I had changed the permissions on the xoops2 files via Konqueror. Could there be a flaw in the gui that prevents my original changes from "sticking" (for lack of a more intelligent term)? Maybe I should have changed permissions from a console?
Here is the earlier nonsense:
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SuSE 9.1 (Box at home, not on host)
MySQL 4.0.18-32 max
PHP 4.3.4
Apache 2.0.49
xoops 2.7
I've installed XOOPS several times now and have had it working quite well. This time, I go through all of the installation pages with no errors. However, usually one of the last pages says to remove the install directory and change the permissions on mainfile.php back to 444. I did not get this page this time. I am taken directly to the link page that takes you to the login page for the first time. When I click on "Here", I get a completely blank white page. In the address bar;
http://localhost/xoops2/index.php.phpMyAdmin works just fine and shows that 31 tables have been created in db xoops2.
The funny thing is, the first time I installed it on this system it went smooth as silk, only took me 5-10 minutes. Then I had a major system crash after doing some online updates, and had to reformat /boot and / partitions. Ever since then, XOOPS gives me the blank screen.
I have tried installing it several times with the exact same result. I re-downloaded it, and tried v2.6 and still no success. Me-thinks it's a system issue.
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