thanks --
"install the official DirectAdmin way"
Like i said, i tried that. of course, that depends on what you call the "official way." Which forum participant's opinion do i accept as the "official" version? Would be great if there were some real DA documentation for this... These awstats problems have been going on for a long time.
I asked you in order to see what your "official" way would be. Obviously, i've already search the forums, google every possible combination, etc., etc., and found a thousand different answers.
"If they install without error then they've installed correctly."
not really. there are lots of steps in the install where the error returns are not handled very well, plus there don't appear to be any verification steps. basically, it just slams the files where it thinks they ought to be, and says, "okay i'm done." for instance, the crontab setup that runs the update seems to be broken, and it has no idea.
I accept a reasonable amount of trouble (because it IS linux/apache), but I really won't accept having to spend days/weeks becoming a DA/awstats/etc guru in order to uninstall/reinstall a single simple software package. With the millions of installed packages out there today, you would think we would have moved beyond hackerware by now.