I need help installing MySQL on 32-bit Windows machine

Databases
1

I’m having an issue with MySQL installation on my 32-bit Windows XP machine. I followed instructions from the following book: Build Your Own Database Driven Web Site Using PHP & MySQL by Kevin Yank.

The book points us to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ and look for Windows Essentials (x86) package. But I can’t seem to find any package with that very name, Windows Essential (86). Without seeing that exact package I was looking for, I downloaded and installed the following package, Windows (x86, 32-bit), MSI Installer, found on http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/installer/5.6.html.

When I perform post-installation task of trying to assign a password to the root user by typing mysqladmin -u root status into the Command Prompt, Windows displays an error message that mysqladmin cannot be found.

Now my question is: which MySQL package is right for my 32-bit Windows XP system? And in which URL can I find it on the MySQL site?

Your help will be much appreciated.

2

That sounds like the correct one. Do you happen to know where you installed mysql? It sounds like the mysql bin directory has not been added to the path. An alternative solution is to skip installing the LAMP stack separately and use XAMP.

Check C:\Program Files\MySQL or perhaps C:\Program Files\Oracle\MySQL. If MySQL was installed it should be located in some place like that on the machine.

I’m not completely certain because I use XAMP and most recently Vagrant with [url=https://www.virtualbox.org/]Virtual Box which is a great alternative to running a local UNIX environment. If you use Vagrant and Virtual Box you can setup a local machine with a unix environment and then install everything using standard UNIX commands to install the LAMP stack packages.

3

Oddz, Thanks for your kind response. Every other thing (PHP, Apache) was working fine, except MySQL. I guess you’re right about not adding PATH to MySQL bin directory, which I wasn’t aware of. After feeling frustrated for days, I finally uninstalled the whole thing and installed Wamp Server. It was during my installation of WAMP that I saw in the instructions that a path to MySQL bin directory needed to be added. Maybe, I’ll give individual installation another go on a different machine. But for now, I’m okay with WAMP.