I guess I could learn a lot from the examples. It's what they are there for. But, when run with mod_wsgi and apache, you get service unavailable--which really doesn't make a lot of sense on localhost, does it?
It appears to work on rocket. But, when I navigate to the actual examples, I get the web2py web site instead of the local copy (which I would access via rocket server on my machine as localhost). This seems sort of broken. I guess no one else needs such basic help or has noticed.