OK, I'm not a complete nuby - I've been using Ruby for almost 5 years
now. But this is my first delve into the wonderful world of web apps.

I have a stock Suse 8.0 installation, ruby 1.8, apache 1.3 and
rails-0.6.5 (from tarball) installation. I  have tried installling
rails according to the README file.

Rails has gone into /usr/local/httpd/cgi-bin/rails. I couldn't find an
apache.conf file, but there was a httpd.conf file in /etc/httpd. I
have tried appending the apache conf section in the README into
/etc/httpd/httpd.conf, changing the path heads to
/usr/local/httpd/cgi-bin/rails/. I also made the whole rails directory
tree publicly readable and writable (chmod -R 777 rails).  So the
section reads

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName rails
    DocumentRoot /usr/local/htppd/cgi-bin/rails/public/
    ErrorLog /usr/local/htppd/cgi-bin/rails/log/apache.log

    <Directory /usr/local/htppd/cgi-bin/rails/public/>
      Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride all
      Allow from all
      Order allow,deny
    </Directory>
  </VirtualHost>

I have also set the cgi-bin section to read
<Location /cgi-bin>
AllowOverride None
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks +Includes
SetHandler cgi-script
</Location>

and I have restarted Apache.
So, the basic problem is that none of the following web addresses give
me the rails spalsh page
http://rails                      - unknown host
http://127.0.0.1/rails            - not found
http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/rails     - forbidden

And (for example) if I try http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/rails  I get the
following line in rails/lo/apache.log
[date] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] attempt to invoke directory as
script: /usr/local/httpd/cgi-bin/rails


What am I doing wrong please?

regards, treefrog