Problem installing sample data

I was surprised to see how much searching it took to find this solution and so thought it worthy of a blog post... ... When installing a fresh copy of Joomla 1.5 you may notice that it comes with a configuration.php-dist file; my assumption upon seeing this was that I should rename it 'configuration.php' and chmod it 777 so that the installer could write the values I fill in during installation to the file. Well, don't worry about the configuration.php file until the end of the install walkthrough screens; you're likely to get an error when trying to install sample data using a pre-defined configuration.php file - instead, wait until the last install screen where a congratulations message is displayed, then copy the code it provides into an empty file called configuration.php and upload it to root. More info @ the forums... (http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?p=1213661#p1213661)

Original Source: the whyjoomla? blog