Hmm… now I’m unable to get MySQL off the ground. I haven’t worked with the LAMP stack since I did a system rebuild on the new HDD, but MySQL is included in the SUSE distro. Shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Running the command mysqld start produces a most interesting message: “Can’t create test file ‘/var/lib/mysql/…’”. Apparently the /var/lib/mysql directory doesn’t even exist. O.o

Someone over at linuxquestions.org suggested another user with a similar issue try mysqld_safe &. Didn’t work: It still complains that the needed directories and files simply do not exist. Hmpt!

Well, it pays to keep reading. Last post in the thread was the ticket: I needed to use service mysql start and all is well.