Trouble setting up a gallery3 instance

I am having a problem similar to many other users here. After entering the mysql connection informtion I get the error

Someone posted, and I quote...

I have confirmed that the password and username is correct. I can log in with that user name and password on the commandline (ie using "mysql -u root -p")

I have tried both "localhost" as well as the hostname. The user in any case does not seem to be "allowed" from outside, eg:

mysql> select host,user,super_priv from mysql.user where user="root";
+-----------+------+------------+
| host      | user | super_priv |
+-----------+------+------------+
| localhost | root | Y          |
| 127.0.0.1 | root | Y          |
+-----------+------+------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

The database name certainly is right, and I must criticise that the "Quick Start page" does not tell you to create a database before hand. But now the database does exist (and the problem persists):

The database exists (as seen by show databases) ... but how do I confirm that it is ok?

What else have I tried?

• Changed owner of all files and directories to that of the web server.
• Stopped and restarted mysql.

More info:

• ~/gal/var exists and is set mode 777.
• No files gets created in it, so I don't get any error logs.

Furthermore and this may be telling:

A few weeks prior to this I succesfully installed gallery3 on another virtual host on the same system (hosted on AWS fwiw). That was my first attempt at gallery3, really just a quick trial, and it worked after a few false starts. I recall that I manually created the database and tried to create a "non-root" admin for the gallery database. But I gave up and then just tried to do it "the normal way" and so I started over... thought probably not "fresh".

That installation worked for a while, I was able to create users, galleries, upload pictures, and so on. In fact the gallery can still be browsed by anonymous users, but when I try to log in I get an error like this:

No amount of talking to myself have helped in fixing this. I have even reset the admin password thinking it got changed using advice found on these forums (which lets me log in as admin and all appears OK, until I try to log out and log in using the normal method again)

FWIW the above troubleshooting is about the extent of my skill, I am no DBA Maybe some system log or mysql log would reveal the cause of my woes... Once I sort out this whole thing I will see whether I can add/update a wiki page with mea learning somewhere.

Are you still working on this?
Stop using the root user.
Create a new user and give that new user permissions on the database.
Give Gallery the username and password for that new user.

Setting AllowOverride to None will cause all htaccess to be ignored.

You can limit what directories you allow to override, and you can limit what overrides are allowed; you don't have to allow everything to be overridden everywhere on the server.

EDIT: Not sure what you already do or don't know, but can start here with the official docs: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/core.html#allowoverride