Author’s Note: Originally published October 2006, the following blog post is still relevant, but it is adviced to use the MySQL Yum Repositories for the latest Fedora Linux distirbutions.
Maybe this is common knowledge by now, but I’ve seen this problem popping up at work and I’ve run into it today. I upgraded Fedora 4 to 5 and wanted to get MySQL 5.1.11 on it instead of the MySQL 5.0 delivered with Fedora 5. This also goes mostly for Red Hat EL btw.
These were the things I had to do, on a system without any production databases. Do not do this on production without backups and lots of coffee!
- Download the generic RPMs from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/: Server, Client, libraries and headers and the shared libraries. Put them all in one directory.
- run in that directory:
$ sudo rpm -Uvh MySQL*
- If point 2 didn’t give errors, you going to have problems starting MySQL.
- mysql system user is missing. To recreate it:
$ sudo adduser -d /var/lib/mysql -s /bin/bash -r -M -l mysql
- I didn’t keep the uid/gid, so I had to make sure permissions were set OK on the existing datadir:
$ sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql
- Next, remove the
--basediroption from the my.cnf under [mysql]
As a general tip: keep an eye on the error log, /var/log/mysqld.log.
That’s it basicly. Run mysql_upgrade if you like, I just removed the mysql/ and grant tables and recreated them new with mysql_install_db. I was removing Plesk which basically messes up your Linux distro.
Hope this helps someone!