I figured this out. It's able to see the settings.php file but instead of the right database credentials it was showing this:

$db_url = 'mysqli://mynamedrupal:xxxxxxxxxxx@localhost/myname-drupal-6';


That's goofy! I'm not even using Drupal 6! There wasn't any updated version of this later in the file; this was the only database connection info. It makes sense that this was in here, since it was originally a D6 site that I upgraded, but it's unusual that it worked so long without an updated array of DB connection info. 

So I pasted this in from another D7 install and changed the un/pw accordingly:

$databases = array (
  'default' =&gt;
  array (
    'default' =&gt;
    array (
      'database' =&gt; 'myname-drupal',
      'username' =&gt; 'myname',
      'password' =&gt; 'xxxxxxxxx',
      'host' =&gt; 'server.host.com',
      'port' =&gt; '',
      'driver' =&gt; 'mysql',
      'prefix' =&gt; '',
    ),
  ),
);


I can't say for sure if this works because now I'm having different, unrelated problems. But I think this solved this particular issue, as far as I can tell, and now I'm on to troubleshooting the next thing. w00t.

My site thinks it's a new install
I installed the Ubuntu 12.04 then I reinstalled Ubuntu 12.10 (the version along with Window 7) When I was using Ubuntu 12.04, I typed ls to show what file are listed in directory(included arm-linux-gcc-4.5.1-v6-vfp-20120301.tgz) And the list show out the file that are needed to be extracted. And that i type sudo tar -zxvf arm-linux-gcc-4.5.1-v6-vfp-20120301.tgz -C / and file was extracted in the same directory with zip file and own by user. After i install Ubuntu 12.10 redo the processes 


ls (check file again)
sudo tar -zxvf arm-linux-gcc-4.5.1-v6-vfp-20120301.tgz -C /
and the extracted  file was in the File System and owned by root and adminstrator can't use it. 


What's wrong??
