Well, it looks it's not a bug afterall. The tutorial I was using was
written
for Windows, which uses the C: drive for everything. THe tutorial has the
database URL as C:\databasedir\databasename. I'm using Linux, so I
substituted
my homedir for the C; drive part. It turns out that in Linux you need the
fully
qualified path, so ~home/workspace/dblocation, which worked.