Curse of knowledge -- I just had to go edit the wp-config file before I ran the setup. Simply unzipping the files, applying permissions to the root and wp-content solved the first problem.
But, another error happened. I can't find the link now, but on these forums a user figured out that having a wp-config.php in the directory below my new wpmu installation caused the problem. Example /var/www/html had a wp-config.php; but the wpmu installation was in /var/www/html/wpmu. I moved the wpmu installation to /var/www/html/wpmu/new-wpmu and that got me a site.
However... I couldn't access the panel. I seemed to re-call that WPMU hates using only the host name. So, I started over and this time using site.domain.com. I'm disappointed I couldn't use a host name only, but it works now.