Having trouble installing and removing MySQL in Ubuntu

Question

I have trouble in installing or removing the partly installed mysql-server-5.6 in ubuntu15.04. The error I am getting was

$ sudo apt-get -f install 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  mysql-server-5.6
The following packages will be upgraded:
  mysql-server-5.6
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
22 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/5,501 kB of archives.
After this operation, 50.8 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] 
Preconfiguring packages ...
Setting up mysql-common (5.6.24-0ubuntu2) ...
update-alternatives: error: alternative path                 /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback doesn't exist
dpkg: error processing package mysql-common (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-common
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/gnome/help: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/omf: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/doc/kde/HTML: 0 KiB

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Can someone help me on this?

Solution 1

A very simple solution which I (the linux noob) had to dig up... is to create the file.

nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback

and fill it with the default content from the mysql-common 5.7.11-0ubuntu6 package.

#
# The MySQL database server configuration file.
#
# You can copy this to one of:
# - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options,
# - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options.
# 
# One can use all long options that the program supports.
# Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with
# --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use.
#
# For explanations see
# http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html

# This will be passed to all mysql clients
# It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes
# escpecially if they contain "#" chars...
# Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location.

# Here is entries for some specific programs
# The following values assume you have at least 32M ram

!includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/

found here at apt-browse.org

Solution 2

Purge/Reinstall also did not work for me. I found the following "solution":

I could not find mysql.cnf.fallback listed in the "provided files" for mysql-server-5.6 / mysql-client-5.6 nor any additional info about the file.

I copied /etc/mysql/my.cnf to /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback (guessing that this would have been a relatively less important "fallback" config file);

/etc/mysql/my.cnf is a symlink, so ls /etc/mysql now shows:

 my.cnf.fallback -> /etc/alternatives/my.cnf
 my.cnf -> /etc/alternatives/my.cnf

The installation of the package then completed without error (since presumably the "doesn't exist" issue was "solved").

I have not come across any adverse effects (yet).

Solution 3

I had the same problem while trying to purge mysql-server (5.7.14).

In case that the my.cnf* files are missing, you can re-install the package mysql-common, and afterwards, you can purge both (mysql-server & mysql-common)

These my.cnf* files belong to mysql-common package (see bellow):

$ dpkg -L mysql-common | grep cnf
/etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback
/etc/mysql/conf.d/mysql.cnf

1. Re-install mysql-common

apt-get install --reinstall mysql-common

2. Purge mysql-common

apt-get purge mysql-common

Solution 4

Confirmed. Order matters.

apt remove mysql-* mariadb-* --purge
apt install mysql-common
apt install mariadb-common
apt install mariadb-server

Solution 5

As noted by charneykaye in the comments, this approach can fail if there's some mysql processes in the background. I used:

emil-mint-desktop ~ # ps -aef | grep mysql
root      6682     1  0 16:45 ?        00:00:00 sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables
root      6683  6682  0 16:45 ?        00:00:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables
mysql     7046  6683  0 16:45 ?        00:00:01 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --plugin-dir=/usr/lib/mysql/plugin --user=mysql --skip-grant-tables --log-error=/var/log/mysql/error.log --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --port=3306 --log-syslog=1 --log-syslog-facility=daemon --log-syslog-tag=
root     21046  9812  0 17:32 pts/5    00:00:00 grep --color=auto mysql

Killed the first 3 processes (the last one is the grep call itself!) using:

kill -9 6682 8883 7046

Then remove everything mysql related:

apt remove --purge mysql-\*
apt autoremove
apt autoclean

and then install:

apt install mysql-server

Then it worked.

Versions:

• Mint 18.1 (based on Ubuntu). You will need to substitute apt for apt-get for some other versions.

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Comments

[Shameerariff]

This sounds great but can you explain the reason for the problem, It would be beneficial for others.

[Dave Kincaid]

This was exactly my problem. This fixed it for me.

[devius]

This is a better answer than the accpeted one because it fixes the actual problem without having to use the brute force approach.

[oalders]

In my case touch /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback got me past the issue.

[cantsay]

Thank you. This solved it for me and should be the anwser.