Thanks Chris - I’ll give this a go tonight.

2009/8/4 Chris Anderson <jchris@apache.org>:
> This line suggests `make` was run with sudo or as a different user at
> some point. Blowing away the source tree and starting from a fresh
> download ought to have fixed this.
>
> There's an alternative build you could try, standing in a freshly
> untarred copy of the couchdb source, to be on the safe side: `make dev
> && utils/run`
>
> This will run CouchDB inside the source directory, instead of
> installing it. The advantage of this is that it should bypass any
> funny business happening on your machine. In the long run you'll want
> to `sudo make install` so that the database files don't go into a temp
> directory, but getting the dev build to happen will be a helpful
> debugging step (and get you on a running couch.)
>
> Also, for more real-time help, the #couchdb channel on
> irc.freenode.net is usually a good place to hang out.
>
> Thanks for working so hard to get it to run.
>
> Chris