First issues with CouchDB

I got my development machine up and running with Ubuntu. My wireless card gave me some trouble (apparently a common phenomenon) but the Windows Wireless Drivers utility came to my rescue.

I’ve been reading CouchDB’s fantastic little book and I’m in the process of getting CouchDB installed. No issues with apt-get install couchdb. After running the first curl command, curl http://127.0.0.1:3984/, I get this message:
curl: (7) couldn’t connect to host.

Uh oh.

Further damning evidence that couchdb isn’t happy: running couchdb gives me this message:
Apache CouchDB needs write permission on the data directory: /var/lib/couchdb/0.8.0

Looks like it’s time to break out the trusty readme file.