I finally got Silverstripe installed, but I found the following gotcha's. I am doing this from scratch with Fedora 7 inside a VMWare virtual machine:

- you must set /var/www/html directory to owner apache:apache, chmod all files to 775
- for some reason SS install aborted with MySQL "access denied", even I double-checked the username/password to be correct and status lights are green; turns out if I create another user called "silverstripe@%", give it proper rights, SS install will now accept (I think it has something to with with site "%" vs. site "localhost")
- in php.ini, just in case, give it more than 32M for memory (I used 48M)
- in php.ini, search for all instances of allow_call_time_pass_reference line before editing; I initially added it to the very first time I saw that varible mentioned - turns out further down file there is another reference
- for the mod_rewrite, changing AllowOverride to All in <Directory /> section is not adequate; you must also change the standalone line AllowOverride (slightly below the <Directory /> section) to All as well.

After those changes, SS finally installed properly.