On Linux you should use the --skip-locking flag to mysqld
if you start it yourself. Normally the demon is started by safe_mysqld
and the flag is added automatically. This flag is needed because a bug
in Linux file locking calls. This bug is known to exist as recently as
Linux version 2.0.33.
If you can't start mysqld or if mysql_install_db doesn't work, please continue reading! This only happens on Linux system with problems in the Linuxthreads or libc/glibc library. There is a lot of simple workarounds to get MySQL to work! The simplest is to use the binary version (not the RPM) of MySQL for Linux x86; One nice aspect of this version is that it's probably 10% faster than any version you would compile yourself! See section How compiling and linking affects the speed of MySQL
When using LinuxThreads you will see a minimum of three processes running. These are in fact threads. There will be one thread for the Linux Threads manager, one thread to handle connections, and one thread to handle alarms and signals.
if you are using RedHat you might get errors like:
/usr/bin/perl is needed... /usr/sh is needed... /usr/sh is needed...
If so upgrade rpm itself to rpm-2.4.11-1.i386.rpm & rpm-devel-2.4.11-1.i386.rpm (or later versions).
You can get the 4.2 updates from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/updates/4.2/i386. Or http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/redhat/code/rpm/ for other distributions.
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