Re: Setting the Home Page
The only step is to select Articles as the Home page in the dropdown list on the Admin General page. Be sure Articles are activated as a feature on the Admin Features page, and that permission to read articles has been granted to Anonymous or other groups that you want to be able to see them.
If you've done all this and the Articles page still doesn't show up as your index page, I don't know what the problem would be.
-- Gary