>Thanks Vladislav.
>If I get you right, I should copy & paste the directories EXCEPT the data
directory.
>Is that correct?
This is correct, and this is what you also should normally do when updating
zips, even if you are not switching MySQL variants.

>I am using Windows at present, but going to switch over to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
soon. :-)
>Can you pl. share the mariadb download url for linux?
Everything is on https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb .
For example
https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/5.5.28a/#os_group=linux_generic would
be tar.gz (if you favor non-install packages, like on Windows, those are
the right ones)