MySQL in a Nutshell

Linux RPM Distributions

If your server is running on a version of Linux that installs software through the RPM package format (where RPM originally stood for RedHat Package Manager), it is recommended that you use a package instead of a source distribution. The differences between RPM versions are based not on the Linux distribution (e.g., SuSE or Mandrake), but on the Linux kernel or the type of libraries installed on the server. For each version of MySQL, there are a few RPM files that you can download. The primary two contain the server and client files. Their naming scheme is MySQL-server-version.rpm and MySQL-client-version.rpm, where version is the actual version number. In addition to these main packages, you may also want to install some of the other RPM files that are part of a distribution. There’s an RPM for client-shared libraries (MySQL-shared-version.rpm), another for libraries and C API include files for certain clients (MySQL-devel-version.rpm), and another for benchmarking and other MySQL performance tests (MySQL-bench-version.rpm).

To install the RPM files after downloading them to your server, enter something like the following from the command line in the directory where they’re located:

rpm -ivh MySQL-server-version.rpm \
         MySQL-client-version.rpm

If an earlier version of MySQL is already installed on the server, you will receive an error message stating this problem, and the installation will be canceled. If you want to upgrade the existing installation, you can ...