We've been getting requests to setup the latest and greatest MySQL server (4.1) recently. As of this time, Red Hat Fedora Core 1, 2 and 3 use MySQL version 3. The fresh installation of MySQL 4.1 on Fedora systems is pretty painless.

The systems I've setup this way have all been Fedora Core 2 systems, but I would expect luck with the same steps on Fedora Core 1 or 3. The Linux x86 RPM downloads from the MySQL site, have all installed beautifully. I've been using the server, client programs, libraries and header files, dynamic client libraries and dynamic client libraries (including 3.23.x libraries) without any problems.

Caveat: the PHP rpms that come with fedora don't like integrating with MySQL 4. Downloading the PHP source RPMs and running `rpmbuild --rebuild` on them after MySQL 4 is installed will link them against the proper libraries and the resulting rpms will install happily. I've also been adding 'mysql*' and 'php*' to the /etc/yum.conf exclude line to prevent yum from stomping over the packages if a new version of PHP or MySQL-3 is released. Of course, we'll have to watch the packages manually for updates. An portion of the yum.conf is below:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=redhat-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1
exclude=mysql* php*
retries=20