[Mediawiki-l] Mediawiki install problem

[Eric]

Good evening all.

Brand new mediawiki user with a bit of a problem early in the install process.

I read through the INSTALL, README, and RELEASE-NOTES docs, grepped on some 
keywords in everything in docs and its subdirectories, searched the FAQ, 
and searched through Usenet via dejanews.

The problem is that I get to the part in INSTALL where it says "Hop into 
your browser and surf into the wiki directory", and I get:

     Forbidden

     You don't have permission to access /wiki/ on this server.

The httpd error log says:

     Permission denied: access to /wiki/index.php denied

I checked the permissions of the wiki directory and its contents and they 
look fine... everything is world readable, and the config directory and its 
contents is owned by the apache user.

Tried changing EVERYTHING to be owned by the apache user, including the 
wiki directory itself, no luck.

Tried moving everything out of the wiki directory and making a 
wiki/index.html with "Hello, world" and it worked fine.

Tried renaming the wiki directory to something else and still got the 
"Forbidden" message.

Checked through all httpd config files and none show anything that could 
reasonably account for it.

I have run other PHP applications, notably horde and turba, and they run fine.

Versions are:
OS: Fedora Core 5
PHP: 5.1.2
MySQL:  5.0.18
Mediawiki:  1.8.2

Any ideas?  I know absolutely nothing worth knowing about PHP but I do have 
many years of off-and-on experience in Linux system administration and 
website administration, and I'm pretty sure I have things set up as they 
should be.