The installation for LnBlog is a fairly easy process. For those who are not technologically inclined, just follow these step-by-step instructions.
The downloaded archive is a standard ZIP file format. On Windows you can
decompress this with WinZip or pretty much any other compression program. On
Linux, you can use your desktop environment's decompression utility, such as
Ark, or run unzip lnblog-version.zip from the command
line.
Use your favorite FTP program to upload the entire LnBlog installation folder to your web hosting account. The folder must go someplace under your web root. If you place it outside the web root, you will not be able to run the setup and configuration programs. Usually it is easiest to simply put the LnBlog folder in the root of your website.
After uploading the LnBlog folder, you need to change the security on it. On Linux/Apache serves, this generally means making the directory writable to everyone. If you don't do this, you will not be able to create a login in the next step. If you don't like having this folder world-writable, you can always change the permissions back once you finish setting up a login.
The exact method for changing permissions will vary with your FTP tool. I use Konqueror's integrated FTP support, so I can change permissions in the file properties box. I also use the LFTP command-line FTP client, which supports a chmod command. Some clients, such as the Windows command-line ftp.exe program, do not support changing permissions.
Please note, you might also want to change the permissions on your web root directory to be world-writable as well. If you do not, then each time you create a new blog, you will have to manually create the directory and make it writable.
Once the LnBlog folder permissions are set, you can open up your web browser and navigate to it. If you put the foler in your website root and named it just "lnblog", then you would navigate to http://www.yoursite.com/lnblog/ to find it. When you do this, you will be prompted to create an administrative login. This login will be used to add new blogs, upgrade old blogs, and will also be the default login for any blogs you create.
After creating an administrative account, you will be directed to the login page. Enter the username and password you just created and you will see the administrative page.
Click on the "Add new blog" link to create a new weblog. On the new weblog page, you can enter the path to the blog, the name, a description, the web server path to an icon for the blog, the theme to use (LnBlog ships with two themes: "default", which I think is very nice, and "skepticats", which is the original and somewhat less nice theme) and the maximum number of entries to display on the front page. When you are done, hit submit and you will be taken to the front page of your new blog.
Please note that it is best to use a relative path to the blog. So, if the URL of LnBlog on your site is http://mysite.com/lnblog/ and you want to create a blog at http://mysite.com/myblog/, then you When you should give the path as ../myblog.
Also note that if the web server account does not have write permissions to the directory where you want the blog, then LnBlog will not be able to create it. You can either change the permissions on the folder that will contain your weblog folder, or you can manually create the folder and change the permissions to be writable by everyone.