[ic] IC server unavailable - ?perhaps permission problems?

[Grant Listhandle]

I've been lurking in this list for some time, with the intention of building 
an Interchange site.  Last week I got started in earnest, and I've run into 
a problem i'm not sure how to approach:

Running on a mandrake 10.0 box, apache, rebuilt perl and IC 5.2.0-1 from 
RPM.

When I access myhost/foundation, I get what appears to be a timeout (30 
second delay) and then the message:

---begin---
We're sorry, the interchange server is unavailable...
We are out of service or may be experiencing high system demand. Please try 
again soon.
---end---

Compared to the FAQ (section 2.1, configuration), I've got the following:

perl -V reveals, in part:  version 5.8.5 and usethreads=undef
cgi-bin/foundation is:  -rwxr -xr -x interch interch
there's nothing in /etc/ with the name socket -- during makecat, I set up 
foundation to use INET sockets, if that's related.

My instinct tells me I have some problem with permissions underlying all 
this-- restarting the IC server in a shell kicks this error:

---begin---
Could not open error file '/usr/lib/interchange/error.log':
Permission denied
to report this error:
- - - [30/August/2004:10:26:42 -0500]  -  - Low traffic settings.
---end--- 

Thanks for reading this far, I hope that one of you may be able to shed some 
light on how to approach this problem.

Familiarity with my OS:  3/10
Willingness to learn:  10/10

Grant