I struggled with this for awhile, abandoning it midway through, but I finally got it to work. Most of the instructions for installing typo 4.0.1 on dreamhost by Aiden Bordner worked for me, except you need to edit db/migrate/051_fix_canonical_server_url.rb as described by Chris H.

To summarize:

1. Download Typo using Subversion:
   svn checkout svn://typosphere.org/typo/trunk typo
2. Setup a new host and set the directory to /home/username/typo/public and enable FastCGI support.
3. Setup a mySQL server.

4. Create config/database.yml:
   ` login: &login   adapter: mysql   host: mySQL server hostname   username: mySQL server username   password: mySQL server password

   development:   database: typo_db   «: *login

   test:   database: typo_db   «: *login

   production:   database: typo_db   «: *login `

5. Edit config/environment.rb and uncomment the line that says ENV[‘RAILS_ENV’] = ‘production’
6. Edit db/migrate/051_fix_canonical_server_url.rb and comment out or delete the line b.settings['canonical_server_url'] = b.settings['canonical_server_url'].gsub(%r{/$},'')
7. Setup your database by running rake migrate RAILS_ENV=production. Note that this step will fail if you don’t edit db/migrate/051_fix_canonical_server_url.rb
8. Edit public/dispatch.fcgi and insert the following code before the line that reads RailsFCGIHandler.process!
   ` class RailsFCGIHandler   private     def frao_handler(signal)       dispatcher_log :info, “asked to terminate immediately”       dispatcher_log :info, “frao handler working its magic!”       restart_handler(signal)     end     alias_method :exit_now_handler, :frao_handler end `
9. Make sure that both public/dispatch.rb and public/dispatch.fcgi are executable.

Typo can sometimes be excruciatingly slow to load up, you may have to reload the page a couple of times.