Hi,
I ran the in-place installation, and it went like a breeze. That said, I don't understand a couple of things...
/var/www/wiki has a dump of the mediawiki-1.2.0 stable tar-ball. Ran through the basic install which means putting LocalSettings.php in the same directory as index.php (/var/www/wiki) I noticed that localsettings.php has the DB name, username and PW in it. If one is readable, won't the other be as well ? Is that safe?