Installation - readConfigFile fopen failed ??

Hello all.

I'm doing my first installation of PEAR. I have encountered many problems but fixed most of them, including file permissions. Now I'm running into this.

Starting installation ...
Loading zlib: ok
Downloading package: PEAR-stable......ok
Downloading package: Archive_Tar-stable....ok
Downloading package: Console_Getopt-stable....ok
Downloading package: XML_RPC-stable....ok
Downloading package: HTML_Template_IT....ok
Downloading package: Net_UserAgent_Detect....ok
Downloading package: PEAR_Frontend_Web....ok
Bootstrapping: PEAR...................(remote) ok
Bootstrapping: Archive_Tar............(remote) ok
Bootstrapping: Console_Getopt.........(remote) ok
Extracting installer..................ok PEAR_Config::readConfigFile fopen('/usr/local/etc/pear.conf','r') failed


Any and all help welcome, even via IM's. Please help. I'll bake cookies! LOL

Thanks

-- Anna