UPDATE:

Something changed at DigitalOcean but I don't know what it was.
I had this site up on 3 different machines running (Firefox,IE,Chrome) all of which had a failed Joomla install screen. All machines had history and cache cleared and retested with the same results also; reload/refresh/ctrl+f5.
This morning 03/10/2014 they were all retested and failed and hour later they all worked.
I have not been into the server at all so there is no reason for the site to start working. The testing local machines were not cleared of cache or history a simple refresh and they all worked.
The only way this could happen is if some one change something on the server and being the only user how can that happen. Hence I say that something or someone at Digital Ocean made a change, I just wish I knew what it was.

I'm pulling the Joomla 2.## version and starting again with Joomla 3.0.

As a side note the general server set up will not work with Joomla back-end unless ftp is enabled as Joomla uses WebServer to PHP Interface:cgi-fcgi and the general set up uses WebServer to PHP Interface:apache2handler. This causes ownership issues as Joomla does not have ownership to install or backup components, yes files are 755 and 644 but Joomla doesn't own them and any interaction requiring access to write to the files results in a failure.

Is anyone out there willing to write a clean tutorial for Joomla, the one posted now is good, thank you for writing it, but I don't think it covers ALL the nuances of Joomla.