Neeraj's Tech Scribbles

I have a red-hat linux 9 server on which I needed to install MySQL 4.1.20. I had already tried using the rpm, and for whatever reason, that just didn't work. So I decided to go with the binary distribution, and boy, it was so much easier!

Here's what I did:

• Downloaded Mysql server archive for RedHat Linux from ftp://mysql.mirror.rafal.ca/pub/mysql/Downloads/MySQL-4.1/mysql-max-4.1.20-pc-linux-gnu-i686.tar.gz
  There are of course other mirrors you could download from.


• The basic commands that you must execute to install and use a MySQL binary distribution are:
  
  shell> groupadd mysql
  shell> useradd -g mysql mysql
  shell> cd /usr/local
  shell> gunzip < /PATH/TO/MYSQL-VERSION-OS.tar.gz | tar xvf - shell> ln -s FULL-PATH-TO-MYSQL-VERSION-OS mysql
  shell> cd mysql
  shell> scripts/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
  shell> chown -R root .
  shell> chown -R mysql data
  shell> chgrp -R mysql .
  shell> bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql &
  
  
  


• If you are upgrading from a 4.1.x version (as I was, from 4.1.11), you could simply replace the [path/to/mysql]/data directory with your old data directory and then restart the server.
  

That's it. It was a heck of a lot simpler than I had thought after reading many articles :).
If you read this and are as lucky as I was - it shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to get it up and running!