Timothy Murphy wrote
I am told after jumping through several hoops "Congratulations, Drupal has been successfully installed. Please review the messages above before continuing on to your new site." I removed write permissions from /etc/drupal/default/settings.php as suggested, and click on "your new site", which takes me to http://www.gayleard.com/drupal/, where I am invited to login. I do not recall ever being asked for a drupal username or password, except for those I gave for the drupal database. But when I give these I am told, "Sorry, unrecognized username or password. Have you forgotten your password?" On clicking on the last sentence I am asked for my username or email address. I don't recall ever giving an email address for drupal, but I give one now, and click on "Email new password".
IIRC, when you first install it, you register a new account and this account #1 becomes the 'webmaster' account with master privileges. I often call it webmaster.
if you're not getting email notifications, its possible you don't have email delivery setup correctly on this machine?
fwiw, i'm running several drupal sites, notably http://astronomy.santa-cruz.ca.us/ and http://troop604.org/