Section 2.4. Linux RPM Distributions

2.4. Linux RPM Distributions

If your server is running on a version of Linux that installs software through the RPM package format (where RPM originally stood for Red Hat
Package Manager), it is recommended that you use a package instead of a
source distribution. Currently, RPMs are provided based on only a couple
of different Linux distributions: various versions of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise. For all other distributions of Linux,
MySQL RPMs are based on the Linux kernel or the type of libraries
installed on the server. For each version of MySQL, there are a few RPM
files that you can download. The primary two contain the server and client
files. Their naming scheme is
MySQL-server-version.rpm
and MySQL-client-version.rpm,
where version is the actual version number. In
addition to these main packages, you may also want to install some of the
other RPM files that are part of a distribution. There's an RPM for
client-shared libraries (MySQL-shared-version.rpm),
another for libraries and C API include files for certain clients
(MySQL-devel-version.rpm),
and another for benchmarking and other MySQL performance tests
(MySQL-bench-version.rpm).

To install RPM files after downloading them to your server, enter
something like the following from the command line in the directory where
they're located:

rpm -ivh MySQL-server-version.rpm \
         MySQL-client-version.rpm

If an earlier version of MySQL is already installed on the server,
you will receive an error message stating this problem, and the
installation will be canceled. If you want to upgrade an existing
installation, you can replace the i option in the
example with an uppercase U.

When the RPM files are installed, the mysqld
daemon will be started or restarted automatically. Once MySQL is installed
and running, you need to make some postinstallation adjustments that are
explained in the last section of this chapter (Section 2.8").