I was setting up the LAMP stack on my arch linux installation, I followed the wonderful arch wiki and had no trouble getting apache and php working but there seems to be a problem with MySQL. It installs just fine but the daemon doesn’t start up.
lovelock# rc.d restart mysqld :: Stopping MySQL Server [FAIL] :: Starting MySQL Server [FAIL]
I tried fixing the ownership and permissions but didn’t have any success. I realized the cause of the problem after running mysqld_safe
lovelock# /etc/rc.d/mysqld
usage: /etc/rc.d/mysqld {start|stop|restart}
lovelock# mysqld_safe
/usr/bin/mysqld_safe: line 531: hostname: command not found
111209 17:06:03 mysqld_safe Logging to '/var/lib/mysql/.err'.
/usr/bin/mysqld_safe: line 608: hostname: command not found
111209 17:06:03 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
111209 17:06:03 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /var/lib/mysql/.pid ended
I installed hostname
pacman -S inetutils
But that didn’t solve it either and I had to do this to fix it
rm -rf /var/lib/mysql/* mysql_install_db --user=mysql --basedir=/usr
This removes the databases and creates a new copy. For me it wasn’t an issue as this is a fresh install but you should be careful when upgrading mysql. Its always handy to back up the databases first.