I was finally able to resolve my problems with Apache and MySQL. When I decided to mount my FAT32 drive under /home/summersd, I inadvertently caused myself some problems. From talking to a Linux guy at work, I found that no processes that weren't running under my user ID could access those files. The reason is that Linux looks up the entire directory tree, back to /, to determine if you can access the file. So, although I had -rwxrwxrwx summersd summersd on every file, /home/summersd was drwx------ summersd summersd, and /home was drwxr-xr-x. The permissions on /home/summersd were keeping Apache from seeing /home/summersd/drive_d/wwwroot, and MySQL from seeing or writing to /home/summersd/drive_d/mysql/data. I moved the drive to /mnt/drive_d, with the mount point being owned by “root”, still mounting the drive with my user name, and everything worked.

In the process of reconfiguring Thunderbird, I believe I may have found out how to share the address book across operating systems. The file ~/.thunderbird/default.[something]/prefs.js has a listing of all the preferences and settings. I modified this file to change the location of my mail files, and there is a setting there for an address book (which isn't shown in the configuration dialog - after all, it is 0.7.3…) I'll play with that later - right now I'm just elated to have Apache and MySQL working again.