We're Sorry error and other questions

[ScottInTexas]

OK I've started. finished the install, not sure what happened there, and started a tutorial. Of course, immediate error. I've made a lsit and cheked it twice to make sure I did all the steps correctly. In a dos command prompt I ran the application creation command and then created the controller MyTest.
In the controllers directory it created My_test_controller.rb. When I went to test it I got an error that says "We're sorry, but something went wrong. We have been notified about this issue and will look into it shortly." In jEdit I have the file open and it has

class MyTestController < ApplicationController
def index
render_text "Not another Hello world?!?"
end
end

1. How do I know things are working as far as the interpreter and the code?
2. Is the "Something went wrong..." equivalent to a 404 eror?
3. Will I always have to start Ruby script/server in a DOS prompt?
4. Does the DOS window always have to remain open while playing with rails?

Windows XP
Firefox 3.5.3
Rails 2.3.4

Tutorial (http://oreilly.com/pub/a/ruby/archive/rails.html?page=2)

Thanks for the patient replies.

[ScottInTexas]

I cintinued to try to find answers to this problem. I did find out where the develop.log was and looked there. The first problem is that it could not load sqlite3. Well, I'm using MySQL so I'm looking into that problem. Another problem (Later) was that I was "Unauthorized" for MySQL. Don't know why because I can open phpMyAdmin just fine.