Is not recommended to chmod [COLOR=“Red”]-R [/COLOR]777 the entire store. This will only open security holes.
You only need to chmod -R 777 the var directory since it contains sub directories. images and skins directories should not be recursive on a new install since they do not yet contain any content other than .htaccess files and those should never be made writable. Someone who understands server security needs to rewrite the install directions because they are confusing and inaccurate.
Did you happen to extract the archive as the Root user in SSH? If so then Apache/PHP probably cannot wright to these directories before you chown proper permissions on them. On most standard Linux servers this command will be (ran as root): chown -R [COLOR=“red”]UserName[/COLOR]:[COLOR=“red”]UserName[/COLOR] /path/to/your/store/dir
Though you didn’t specify the version, I had this problem before when I was trying to install the trial version of 1.34 sp3. File permission didn’t solve my problem. What I actually did was to delete the file and downloaded a fresh copy from file download area. Unzip it and ftp it to my server. Assign the appropriate permissions to the folders as stated in this manual. Bam, it all went well.
Make sure safe_mode is off.
Also, I found that uploading the site via FTP works better than doing the untar directly at the server.