Another Newbie problem

[bill purvis]

Hi, 
I'm beginning to think I've gone seriously wrong switching
to Ubuntu. There's some really nice things about it, but
I seem to be hitting a lot of problems. I used Synaptic
to install Apache, PHP and MySQL, but when it was
installing MySQLO it ran out of disk space in the
root partition (actually /var). I have moved /var into
another partition so there is now a reasonable amount
of space, using Synaptic to remove mysql-server and
mysql-server-5.0, then tried to reinstall them.
Sadly it gives up during the install and produces
some cryptic (to me) error messages:

---------------------------------------------------

Preconfiguring packages ...
Selecting previously deselected package mysql-server-5.0.
(Reading database ... 97350 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mysql-server-5.0 
(from .../mysql-server-5.0_5.0.38-0ubuntu1.1_i386.deb) ...
Selecting previously deselected package mysql-server.
Unpacking mysql-server (from .../mysql-server_5.0.38-0ubuntu1.1_all.deb) ...
Setting up mysql-server-5.0 (5.0.38-0ubuntu1.1) ...
 * Stopping MySQL database server mysqld
   ...done.
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld
   ...fail!
invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing mysql-server-5.0 (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-server:
 mysql-server depends on mysql-server-5.0; however:
  Package mysql-server-5.0 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing mysql-server (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-server-5.0
 mysql-server
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
A package failed to install.  Trying to recover:
Setting up mysql-server-5.0 (5.0.38-0ubuntu1.1) ...
 * Stopping MySQL database server mysqld
   ...done.
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld
   ...fail!
invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing mysql-server-5.0 (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-server:
 mysql-server depends on mysql-server-5.0; however:
  Package mysql-server-5.0 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing mysql-server (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured

-----------------------------------------------------
Can anyone tell me how to get out of this mess?

Bill
-- 
+---------------------------------------+
| Bill Purvis, Amateur Mathematician    |
|  email: bil at beeb.net                  |
|  http://bil.members.beeb.net          |
+---------------------------------------+