This is my own personal PC, I am doing this for class. I am running fedora in VMware. should I delete that one and start over? That sucks because I am on lab 5 and will have to go back and do all the labs.

I am logging off now. On my way to class. I will be back online in about an hour.

You should be able to fix it without a reinstall. Since it is in a VM, you can create a second one in a VM just to get the log file permissions to use to fix the first one? Since you are learning it would be a useful learning experience - good for the real world where these things still happen!

I have had a short break to think about this, and hopefully offer some helpful advice to recover from the ownership change.

First of all, if you haven't done anything else, you are just one bad command deep and haven't removed or damaged anything, so you can probably recover if done carefully.

First of all, from your list of changes I would do the following steps:

I really have no idea about the anaconda, gpm and afew others, but lets go with root:root and just be alert for errors reported later or on next boot, and handle them when they arise. All things considered you may get off easy! But if possible I would still recommend comparing it to a clean installed VM.

OK, back to mysql - it appears to me still that mysql has never been initialized. Just to be ABSOLUTELY sure, what is the output of (as root, or with sudo)...

After that we can set up your mysql safely.

Hope this helps - let me know what you find!

well, changing log owners was a bad mistake and I am not able to fix that, but the original problem was to start mysql.

using mysql_install_db on a existing database instance may be a bad mistake too, you might overwrite already existing data, at least in the mysql schema. Better check the data directory (usually /var/lib/mysql/data on newer versions), if there are directories like mysql, test, and maybe more containing your own data. You might also search for files ending with .frm, have a look at that place for further mysql structure.

If none can be found go on with mysql_install_db.

has mysql ever run before on this machine?