I have been struggling to get mariadb to work. My problems have been either the server is very erratic, usually will not start it. After trying a complete reinstall I can not install the mariadb-server-5.2 package either from the repository or from a deb. I am using Ubuntu/Pinguy 11.04.
The installation results from apt-get or aptitude are
sudo aptitude install mariadb-server-5.2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
mariadb-server-5.2
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 21 not upgraded.
Need to get 13.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 30.8 MB will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/mariadb/repo/5.2/ubuntu/ natty/main mariadb-server-5.2 amd64 5.2.7-mariadb101~natty [13.6 MB]
Fetched 13.6 MB in 4s (2,733 kB/s)
Preconfiguring packages ...
(Reading database ... 427308 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mariadb-server-5.2 (from .../mariadb-server-5.2_5.2.7-mariadb101~natty_amd64.deb) ...
Aborting downgrade from (at least) 5.3 to 5.2.
If are sure you want to downgrade to 5.2, remove the file
/var/lib/mysql/debian-*.flag and try installing again.
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mariadb-server-5.2_5.2.7-mariadb101~natty_amd64.deb (--unpack):
subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/mariadb-server-5.2_5.2.7-mariadb101~natty_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
A package failed to install. Trying to recover:
I tried MySQL 5.1.7 from the Ubuntu repository and got the same results.
Searching various forums/online information has not turned up an answer including MySQL and Ubuntu.