Ok I have followed the installation readme to a T. I can add in averything I can validate everything but whne I go to the homepage it says

FORBIDDEN
you do not have access to /cgibin/pages
How come? I have all permissions set correctly.
now if I point it to xxxxx/cgibin/pages/index.html
I get an internal server error.

Could I be doing something majorly wrong?

On almost all servers, you cannot load html pages from a cgi directory. They should always be in a web directory. I suggest you change your links.cfg to point $build_root_path and $build_root_url to point to a web directory, then rebuild and see if you can load them in your browser. If you can, then starting deleting them from the cgibin/pages directory.

Also, most cgi directories are referred to as "cgi-bin", not "cgibin" so make sure that isn't the problem.

I hope this helps.