Installing MySQL - Learning MySQL - page 22

Downloading and Verifying Files from the MySQL AB Web Site
We'll now describe in detail the steps you need to follow to get MySQL up and running
on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X systems. We'll also describe how to start, stop,
and configure your MySQL server.
If you install MySQL using the packages provided by MySQL AB, you still need Apache,
PHP, and Perl for the later chapters in this topic. You can instead follow the instructions
to install the XAMPP integrated package to get everything you need. For Linux, you
can also use packages provided by your distribution.
Downloading MySQL from the MySQL AB Web Site
The MySQL AB web site usually has the very latest versions of the MySQL software.
To download from this web site, follow these steps:
1. Visit the MySQL AB downloads page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads . Fig-
ure 2-2 shows what this page looks like.
2. Select the MySQL version that you want. You'll normally want the latest Generally
Available (GA) release; this is 5.0.67 at the time of writing. However, you can also
download the cutting-edge beta version to try out new features or to help identify
problems before the new version becomes the general release.
3. You'll see a long list of packages for the MySQL version you selected; Figure 2-3
shows part of this downloads page. Select the appropriate package to download
for your system. In the following sections, we'll tell you what this is for each op-
erating system and installation approach.
4. Before the file download starts, you'll probably be asked to to pick a mirror server
near you. Mirrors are servers that have identical copies of files for download, and
are used to share the burden of many people downloading the packages. The
MySQL site uses an IP-to-location database to guess where you are and will suggest
some nearby servers you can download from. Selecting a mirror will start the file
download.
Verifying Package Integrity with MD5
When downloading files from the Internet, it's a good idea to ensure that what you've
got is what you wanted to get. For a production server, we recommend that you check
the integrity of packages that you download. A simple way to do this is to compare
checksums generated by a digest algorithm such as MD5.
A digest algorithm takes some data (for example, an RPM file) as input and calculates
a 128-bit number, or checksum , from this data. With a good digest algorithm, it's prac-
tically impossible to change the data without changing the checksum, so if the check-
sums of two files match, you can be certain that the files are identical.