Many Drupal users have encountered a lot of instances of the following error in the dblog of their site "Got error 28 from storage engine query: SELECT DISTINCT(p.perm)". If you found yourself encountering the same error in your Drupal website then read on to find out the solution.
MySQL
On a Drupal site that came up for some minor alterations recently we came across an issue where some menu links disappeared for anonymous users while they appeared normally for the administrative users. On digging further we came across an issue with an implementation of hook_db_rewrite_sql in a contributed module. But along the way we had to debug the full process of generation of primary links and how node level access permissions are checked during this process.
The simplest debugging tool used most often by a programmer is a print statement, which when placed, used wisely can bring out the weak points of any giant bug.
Most of the web based systems that we build at Zyxware uses Drupal as the content framework. The following are the steps involved in setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL and Drupal on a freshly installed Ubuntu 8.04 system. If you follow the instructions you should be able to set it up as is but if you face problems let us know and we will try to help you.