Hi @asmecher,
OK… Having used the MySQLi driver, and then created the database & user in advance to avoid those subsequent errors, I’ve reached what I hope is my final basic installation issue. I’m getting the error: “The directory specified for uploaded files does not exist or is not writable.”
The first directory I tried was /opt/ojs. I changed its owner to www-data & set its permissions to 664. When that didn’t work, I figured that maybe OJS was unhappy with /opt still being owned by root. So I created /opt2/ojs and made sure all of it was owned by www-data with 664 permissions. Still no luck.
Any recommendations? Does hitting the [Install Open Journal Systems] button on the web interface maybe not make a fresh attempt?