Hi there, I have installed rh9 out of the box and selected mysql to be installed as part of the general install

It seems to have aotomatically created the mysql user and group but for some reason when i am getting errors when attempting to connect. this is what im doing

first I start the server (ive tried this with both root and mysql users)

#safe_mysqld &

Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
041014 14:11:11 mysqld ended


[1]+ Done safe_mysqld

Then I try to launch mysql from the command line (ive tried this with both root and mysql users)

# mysql

ERROR 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

So i first check to see if mysql is running , and it doesnt seem as if it is

#ps -ef | grep mysql
root 16577 16471 0 14:11 pts/2 00:00:00 grep mysql

as you can see above when i run "safe_mysqld" it reports back "mysql ended" on the last line, so i presume that when trying to start it , it dies immediately ??????

any help on this would be greatly appreciated

by the way , this is the entry in the log file

-----------
041014 16:35:06 mysqld started
Cannot initialize InnoDB as 'innodb_data_file_path' is not set.
If you do not want to use transactional InnoDB tables, add a line
skip-innodb
to the [mysqld] section of init parameters in your my.cnf
or my.ini. If you want to use InnoDB tables, add to the [mysqld]
section, for example,
innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend
But to get good performance you should adjust for your hardware
the InnoDB startup options listed in section 2 at
http://www.innodb.com/ibman.html
041014 16:35:06 /usr/libexec/mysqld: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist
041014 16:35:06 mysqld ended

found the answer, I needed to run mysql_install_db before starting the server for the first time