My latest Tech Obstacle and the solution
I love a lot of the ease of use that my mac affords me, however, there are some serious hurdles sometimes. Here is my tale of woe and the solution that makes me smile again.
I use my macbook to develop using php and mysql. I had it all set up when I had osx 10.5 and it all worked great. Once I upgraded to 10.6 things changed for the worse. A couple months after the upgrade, I noticed that mysqld was crashing or refusing to start altogether. I thought that perhaps it just needed and upgrade and so I installed mysql 5.5.09 32 bit for osx 10.6 in hopes of fixing the problem. Result…. NADA! couldn’t get it to go. Had the security warning come up saying that it didn’t have privileges and the osx was disabling it. A hunt on the net revealed several others having the same problem. I tried all the hacks: Chown the mysql dir, changed my.cnf, changed mysql.server, etc…. Still couldn’t get mysqld to establish a PID. Several uninstalls and reinstalls later, and I was totally defeated. The easy built in solution is now unworkable, but all is not lost.
Enter MAMP!! short for Mac, Apache, Mysql and PHP. The solution is so simple and easy. Download the package, install and bam! I now have a working dev environment again. I has an easy to use web based interface and comes complete with phpMyadmin and several other tools that make configuration very easy. For anyone having the same issues, I hardily recommend this solution. Oh did I forget to mention that its free?
Have a nice day
