I appreciate your suggestion and see this dreaded PCRE error is not so unusual. I have tried reinstalling pcre with (again) enabling utf8, I have reinstalled PHP and upgraded to php5. Still the same error: "PHP Warning: Compilation failed: this version of PCRE is not compiled with PCRE_UTF8 support at offset 0 in /usr/local/shambhala/dokuwiki/inc/utf8.php on line 421, referer:
http://wiki/doku.php" and yet I did successfully get this running on an Ubuntu and now also a Suse Linux box. So there seems to be a problem here and it would be great of the FAQ (or some other docs) could be developed that would help unravel this annoying issue. (I see that many of the Drupal install issues relate to this same problem.)
So any further suggestions would be greatly appreciated.