If you have trouble installing the document management and download component DOCman on Joomla 1.5, this solution might help. It seems that DOCman does not work with PHP 4. It always gives you an installation error saying: Unwriteable <joomla root>/

So here is what you can do about it. If you run your installation on a shared server try to enable PHP 5 with the help of your .htaccess file. Some hostersallow this by adding the following line:

AddHandler php5-cgi .php

After adding this line to your .htaccess file you can have a look at your Joomla backend "Help - System" and see if the PHPversion changed. If everything went well, you can install now DOCman 1.40 without any problems.

PS: If you need to remove the double entriesin the DOCman backend that were created by the erroreous installations, you need to go to the Modules Manager - Administrator. You will find them there.