I am installing Moodle locally on a Mac. When I go to run install.php I get error 500 message.

Try changing the following lines in httpd.conf:

AllowOverride All

To:

AllowOverride None

rename .htaccess

Actually, I think its an .htaccess issue. Subversion passes the .htaccess file in the checkout unfortunately. If you’re just testing locally, you can rename your .htaccess file to something else like .htaccess_bak and then try again. This will ensure that you have access to the moodle directory. The .htaccess file tells apache to look for shibboleth authentication before allowing access to the moodle directory.