Assuming you are on a *nix box do the following:
chown -R <webuser>:<webuser> /path/to/geeklog/
Replace <webuser> with what username your webserver runs as (usually nobody or apache).
chmod -R 777 /path/to/geeklog/logs/
chmod -R 777 /path/to/geeklog/public_html/backend/
If that doesn't work, share what version of Geeklog you are trying to install.
The reason people blame things on previous generations is that there's only one other choice.