MySQL 5.5 on Ubuntu 10.10
As we all know, MySQL 5.5 is the best thing since sliced bread (or, not exactly, but that’s what everyone will have you think), but unfortunately Ubuntu‘s latest and greatest server operating system – Ubuntu 10.10 Server comes with MySQL 5.1.
Even the next version of Ubuntu – 11.04 Natty Narwhal – doesn’t seem to deliver MySQL 5.5, so upgrading is not really an option as of yet. There is a bug report to deliver MySQL 5.5 for Natty, which is even marked as “in progress” but there’s no guarantee that it will happen.
So how to go about (ab)using the latest software from Oracle? One way is to build it yourself on your server, or convert the Oracle provided RPM packages using the alien tool – but its not really Ubuntu native and a mess (in both cases). Here is another approach: