On Wed, 2007-03-21 at 13:00 -0700, Al Sparks wrote:

You know, I suppose I could simply install the tarball, I've successfully installed mysql in the past that way. However, I thought I'd use yum, install the redhat/CentOS way, and I am amazed how hard it is to get this thing working. I admit to not having become all that familiar with mysql.

Anyway, when I run # mysql_install_db --user=mysql

I get a bunch of errors:

070321 11:50:43 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Can't find file: 
'./mysql/help_topic.frm' (errno: 13)

So I find out where the file is, and cd /var/lib/mysql and to confirm I do a ls ./mysql/help_relation.frm

I run # mysql_install_db --user=mysql

Same error. I'll be glad for some help, but a secondary point I'd like to make is, what's the point in having packages if a lot of this stuff isn't already taken care of? Obviously the yum package manager puts the mysql distro in different places than the mysql tarball does by default. But shouldn't the package's config files take all that into account?

Why is this so hard?

You don't have to initialize mysql db : it will be done automagically when you'll start the mysqld service for the first time (service mysqld start) ... Have a look in the mysqld init script (that rpm/yum provides you so gently) , especially in the start() function ...