Hi Dan

distro is linux speak for version of OS - e.g. desktop ubuntu 10.04
from CD, or ubuntu 10.04 server on Amazon EC2.

You've got 2 separate issues here so let's tackle these 1 by 1. First
up is getting the self-contained couch folder running as your normal
user - not as root. this is both best practice & simpler normally.

the first error is "{{badmatch,{error,eacces}}," which confused me too
when I first started couching. This is a simple access denied one,
probably the ini files causing this.

I whipped up a desktop ubuntu & pulled down the installer from see
what's going on & it worked perfectly for me (nice one Jason@) but I
think this is just permissions issues & path stuff. It is probably
easier to start from scratch so let's do that.

* delete any existing folder called /home/danuser/couchdb-1.0.1
* download either the 32 or 64-bit version as appropriate from
http://www.couch.io/get to your desktop. I'm 64-bit ubuntu 10.04 so
this was http://dl.couchone.com/dl/26f246a0fe23d6a53d5326713308f43c/install-couchdb-1.0.1_rel1-linux-x64.bin
for me.
* make it executable by right-clicking it, select "properties" then
the permissions tab, and tick the "execute" box, then click close.
* open up a terminal
* type the following, followed by a tab to complete the filename:
    ~/Desktop/install-couch
* this should expand into ~/Desktop/install-couchdb-1.0.1_rel1-linux-x64.bin
* press enter to run the installer
* accept the default location which should be
/home/danuser/couchdb-1.0.1 & finish the install wizard
* go back to your File Browser and open up /home/danuser/couchdb-1.0.1/bin
* double-click couchdb & tell it to run in a terminal
* you should get the "Apache CouchDB has started. Time to relax."
message, and can now go to your browser for the futon interface at
http://127.0.0.1:5984/_utils

How do you get on with this?

If you have any issues send back the output from the following
commands in your terminal:

cd ~
uname -a
ls -ld couch*
ls -lR couchdb-1.0.1/var
ls -lR couchdb-1.0.1/etc

& any errors from the terminal windows, or anything in
~/couchdb-1.0.1/var/log/couchdb/

For your next question "how do I run CouchDB at startup" do you mean
when you login, or all the time in the background? The latter is
probably best being built from source, & doing a proper install. I'll
have a fiddle with this in the next few days & get some simple steps
together unless somebody has a better idea.

cheers
Dave