Switch2Osm instructions wrong?

I just followed instruction from http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/building-a-tile-server-from-packages/ on my virtual machine. I tried 3 times, using different countries from http://download.geofabrik.de/openstreetmap/ and couldn't get my local tiles generated, browsing to http://localhost/osm/slippymap.html.

I also tried this instructions: http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-12-04. However I ended up with the same result.

Are those manuals still viable?

EDIT: I tried on Ubuntu 12.04.1 32-bit

EDIT2: Solved. I will update this post soon after I verify installation/fixing steps again. Seems like libapache2-mod-tile tries to load data from outdated link, getting 404 error and hence making mapnik/renderd unable to render a tile.

EDIT3: OK. So the problem was when I install libapache2-mod-tile, it tries to load ne_10m_populated_places and 110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land from http://www.naturalearthdata.com and fails to do so:

--2013-01-11 15:07:10--  http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/10m/cultural/10m-populated-places.zip
Resolving www.naturalearthdata.com (www.naturalearthdata.com)... 66.147.242.194
Connecting to www.naturalearthdata.com (www.naturalearthdata.com)|66.147.242.194|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2013-01-11 15:07:12 ERROR 404: Not Found.

--2013-01-11 15:07:12--  http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/110m/cultural/110m-admin-0-boundary-lines.zip
Resolving www.naturalearthdata.com (www.naturalearthdata.com)... 66.147.242.194
Connecting to www.naturalearthdata.com (www.naturalearthdata.com)|66.147.242.194|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
2013-01-11 15:07:13 ERROR 404: Not Found.

So I kept getting this error in /var/log/syslog from renderd:

An error occurred while loading the map layer 'default': Shape Plugin: shapefile '/us
r/share/mapnik-osm-data/world_boundaries/110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.shp' does not exist (encountered during parsing of layer 'ne
countries' in map '/etc/mapnik-osm-data/osm.xml')

I am not sure whether it is my own issue since it may get blocked by my company firewall (although error message must be different), so it would've been nice if someone could double check it.

I solved it by manually downloading those archives from links provided by: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapnik
(those are: ne_10m_populated_places.zip and ne_110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.zip on that wiki page). Then I extracted them and copied .dbf, .prj, .shp, .shx files to /usr/share/mapnik-osm-data/world_boundaries. And I had to rename ne_110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land to 110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land, removing ne_ prefix from them.

After that I restarted renderd by:

sudo /etc/init.d/renderd restart

I guess the problem is caused by invalid link during installation of libapache2-mod-tile: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/10m/cultural

PS sorry for using "code" tags in inappropriate places. Parser kept "eating" my underscore symbols.