Technology- MySQL
posted in Technology |My efforts today were an interesting illustration of some of the differences between Windows
and Linux. Like I mentioned before this Ubuntu Linux has come miles from what I remember in
terms of the ease of setup. A couple of days ago I installed MySQL 5.0 on my Windows server which
was pretty much 100% automatic. Install and it ran a nice little wizard to help with initial setup and it was all running.
This morning I went into the Synaptic Package Manager on the linux machine to install
it. All went pretty easily and I got it installed in just a
few minutes which was mostly download time.
The first snag happens when I go to try to set up some accounts for my
apps to authenticate to the server. The Linux box isn’t accepting the
commands that worked on the Windows one. After a bit of messing around I notice
that the Linux machine has MySQL 4 installed which is pretty radically different
than version 5. I head back to the package manager and am surprised to see
no option to install version 5.
Next I head to the MySQL site which has 13 (13!) different options of linux-based
downloads depending on the specific Linux distribution. I guess “Linux x86 generic RPM” and
download those just to discover that I don’t have the RPM utility. I head to the package
manager to install the RPM utility only to see that it warns me that it will break the
Debian based package installs (which is what Ubutntu is based on).
At this point I’m pretty frustrated but a quick search on Google helped me find
Roland Bouman’s site.
Roland appears to have hit the exact same issues as me and his page describing what to do was an
amazing help as I worked through the rest of the problems. I hit a few more snags including installs
that didn’t work. I didn’t notice at first since the failure wasn’t really clearly communicated,
but I couldn’t find the installed files. Next I hit a few issues with trying to figure out the
capitalization that they used for various files and since Linux/Unix is case-sensitive this all
matters a ton.
In the end I finally got it working although I’ll need to dig in a bunch more tomorrow to make
sure that its setup right, logging correctly and putting files in a reasonable place.
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