No mail send to first login - dead end

Hi - after sweeping through all the posts in the getting started forum I got pretty frustated.

I installed ellg 0.9 before and got it up and running  on a windows machine.

Now I want to get serious and installed 1.1 on a Linux box. Here I am stuck after the first registration. No mail is send so I can not register the first user. Mail server is up and running on the machine. I checked the php.ini and found that mstp is configured all right to localhost. Is there any error log that I can check?

I also saw, that this question has been posted before, but there are no answers. Could the cracks among you give me a hint? I really got to get this flying. I surely appreciate it.