bladez

Well I am going to answer my own questions or at least some of it. As for the utf8_decode() issue, you must have PHP-XML installed. On Mandrake 10.0, when you install PHP and Apache, it does not do that by default.
utf8_decode() is part of the XML package. That only took three days to figure out.
Now as far as all that garbage at the biginning of the install, I still get it, but it’s running now, so I don’t care.