[ themattreid ]

Some notes from my recent installation of MySQL 5.4.2-beta on a PPC G5 box running OSX 10.5.8. Hopefully these notes will save someone a bit of time when they begin the “I want to make my mac a development box” process. I’m not going to cover installing/configuring Apache and PHP since the web is full of those articles already.  So, first things first,  I downloaded the pkg file  – not the tarball – from the MySQL downloads site and installed the following files in the following order:

1. mysql-5.4.2-beta-osx10.5-powerpc-64bit.pkg
2. MySQLStartupItem.pkg
3. MySQL.prefPane

CNF File Settings

Here are some interesting settings that you may want to be aware of with 5.4 and OSX

• Do not set innodb_flush_method=fdatasync – it’s not a valid option, and the default after install is actually blank.
• Do not set “nice = value” in the [mysqld_safe] section as this is not recognized and give the error ‘nice: illegal option — -‘
• Set the variable lower_case_table_names=2 because the HFS+ file system is case insensitive – isn’t that special.
• The variable ‘log_slow_queries’ will work but you should use ‘slow_query_log’ or ‘slow_query_log_file’ instead since it’s getting removed in *gasp* MySQL 7.0 so we do have a bit of time before that becomes something to be concerned about but you will see it in the error log if you don’t correct it now.

Preference Pane service controller

In order to get the Preference Pane controller to work (if you are getting the following error in /var/log/system.log – “Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access”) you need to correct the permissions for the installation directory as such
(root@g5)-(/usr/local)-
shell> chown -R _mysql:wheel /usr/local/mysql*

This will still generate the ‘(os/kern) no access‘ message in the system.log but the server will be started/stopped by the pane controller and that’s what we really care about. There may be some more notes along the way as I’m going to be testing 5.4 quite a bit for various application related matters.