Can you tell me a little about the directory structure you have used? I want to replicate this for testing, or it may be that I'll just spot something off right away. In particular, I need to know where the cake, zuluru, webroot and plugins folders are (relative to each other, I don't need absolute paths if you're concerned about security), and where the DocumentRoot of your Apache setup for this host is pointing to. For example, in a "standard" installation, you have x/cake, x/zuluru, x/zuluru/webroot and x/zuluru/plugins, and DocumentRoot points to x/zuluru/webroot. For most shared hosting plans, though, you'll generally need to modify that structure somewhat, and you've got your Zuluru in a subfolder so I expect you've modified it too.
I am running Linux Mint and used Synaptic to install cakephp 1.3.15. I think that puts cake in /usr/share/php/cake
Apache is set up to look for pages in /var/www
I create a directly in /var/www/XXXX and complete your installation steps (gits and chmod for directories.)
Hmm. I thought we'd resolved this one. I think that what's happened is that you followed the "delete installation directory" link at the end of the initial install, so now that plugin is no longer there, and that's what's needed for updates. When I wrote the installer, there were no updates, and when I added them I never went back and removed that link. I took the idea from some other software (don't remember which), but I'm unconvinced that there's any actual benefit to having done so; the update shouldn't be able to break anything, so I don't see any harm in it being there for people to try to run it. I guess the idea is "better safe than sorry", but if deleting it is going to cause update problems then I should probably just leave it in place.
For you, I'd think that something like "git checkout -- plugins/install" might recover it.