Fatal Error on Local Installation

been battling the installation, and i've not got very far. vanilla 1 installs fine. vanilla 2 fails each time.
Fatal Error in Gdn_Database.Query();
Database was queried with an empty string.
Application: Garden
Application Version: 1.0
PHP Version: 5.3.0
Operating System: Darwin
Referer: http://127.0.0.1/~dave/garden/index.php/garden/gardensetup
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Request Uri: /~dave/garden/index.php/garden/gardensetup
Controller: Gdn_Database
Method: Query
Fatal Error in Gdn_Database.Query();
Database was queried with an empty string.
Application: Garden
Application Version: 1.0
PHP Version: 5.3.0
Operating System: Darwin
Referer: http://127.0.0.1/~dave/garden/index.php/garden/gardensetup
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10
Request Uri: /~dave/garden/index.php/garden/gardensetup
Controller: Gdn_Database
Method: Query
0
Comments
http://github.com/lussumo/Garden/issues/issue/227
If you recreate a brand new install, and fill everything (not migrating from an old v1), does it work?
If yes, it's just a matter of validation not starting on the first try.
@iPollesion i looked at the before, but i'm not sure what the solution was there. i tried what bean mentioned and no dice.
it installs fine on my web host, just can't seem to get it working on my machine... so maybe i'll tweak a few things and see what i come up with