Using MySQL Commands

[Brad De Vries]

All, I have the server edition of Gutsy Gibbon installed and working
nicely except for MySQL.  The daemon seems to start fine:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql status
 * /usr/bin/mysqladmin  Ver 8.41 Distrib 5.0.45, for pc-linux-gnu on i486
Copyright (C) 2000-2006 MySQL AB
This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software,
and you are welcome to modify and redistribute it under the GPL license

Server version          5.0.45-Debian_1ubuntu3.1-log
Protocol version        10
Connection              Localhost via UNIX socket
UNIX socket             /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Uptime:                 2 hours 35 min 4 sec

Threads: 1  Questions: 33  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 23  Flush tables: 1
 Open tables: 17  Queries per second avg: 0.004

but when I try to connect using the mysql command, I get errors:

$ mysql -u root test
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using
password: NO)

I did run the mysql_install_db command and it appeared to run fine but
I haven't been able to set the root password:

$ sudo mysqladmin -u root password newpassword
mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)'

Anyone have any thoughts about what I might be doing wrong here?

TIA,
Brad.