Thanks to those who narrowed down the source of this problem: if you're
getting the database error when it's trying to convert the link tables,
this is because it's mistakenly switching from the root connection to
the database down to the less-privileged account which is unable to
alter the table structures.
Here's a patch which will keep it using the root login during this step:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/2004-September/003424.html
Note that if you don't have MySQL root access _at all_, you may need to
provide the old $wgDBadminuser and $wgDBadminpass as the database
username and password to the new installer.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)