[Leaplist] Ubuntu 8.02 and MySQL 5.x

[Max F Lang]

After buying my son a new laptop, I took over his old one to install  
and play around with Ubuntu. Actually really been enjoying it, it  
works beautifully in almost all ways, including X and Gnome. I used  
Synaptic to install all the available MySQL ver5 server and client  
packages (and a bunch others) to play around with the system.

A big problem first cropped up that Ubuntu (or general Debian?) MySQL  
uses a special back-end admin user to do updates and MySQL system  
administration, along with a basically impotent root user with its  
own unknown password. This immediately left me with no way to use the  
server, as I couldn't add my own user or change the root user's  
permissions. No adding, dropping, etc databases or doing much of  
anything else. Using the normal procedure, I reset the root password  
and brought up its permissions to get stuff done, and also reset the  
special Debian admin user's password. Now I get the impression I  
shouldn't have done that last step, at least.

Now Synaptic tells me there's an update to the server package, and  
because the admin user's password is not what the updater is  
expecting, the package update fails. Nor can I now just remove the  
server package to reinstall it back to default. The command line apt  
can't help, and I'm no apt/Synaptic expert. And Synaptic has no "just  
remove the damn package anyway" button.

I'm sure the MySQL server update is important, and I'd love to help  
it out. How can I go about removing the current server package to  
reinstall? And based on normal practices, how then in the future do I  
admin an Ubuntu MySQL server with the default admin and/or root users?


Thanks!
Max.

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.