WordPress install.php not showing

Although, judging by the time that has passed since my last post, it may appear I'm no longer confused, this is not true. I'm constantly confused, about everything. In fact, just today I tried to install WordPress 2.3 on a virtual server here at DERI, and was very confused when the setup php script didn't run (.../blog/wp-admin/install.php). The browser didn't show any error message, but instead just a blank page. After a while of scratching my head I decided to look at the httpd error logs (always a good idea in such situations, I guess), and found this:

$ sudo tail /etc/httpd/logs/error_log
...
[client 10.2.18.50] PHP Fatal error:  Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 233472 bytes) in /var/www/html/blog/wp-admin/includes/schema.php on line 107
Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 0 bytes)

Aha! Some memory problem. So, googling for "PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of" quickly brought me to this page, which had the solution: just increase the allowed memory size for PHP scripts from the default 8MB to something higher (e.g. 12MB). This can either be done at the top of the culprit script itself (didn't work for me):

ini_set("memory_limit","12M");

or in /etc/php.ini (or wherever your php.ini is):

memory_limit = 12M

Perfect. After fixing this, the installation ran smoothly.