Announcing Portable MariaDB: Small, portable binary MariaDB distribution for Linux

Portable MariaDB is a small, portable binary distribution of the SQL server MariaDB (Monty's fork of MySQL) for Linux i386 (32-bit). Only the mysqld binary and a versatile init script are included. Portable MariaDB can be run by any user in any directory, it doesn't try to access any mysqld data or config files outside its directory. Portable MariaDB can coexist with regular mysqld (MySQL or MariaDB) and other instances of Portable MariaDB on a single machine, as long as they are not configured to listen on the same TCP port. The only dependency of Portable MariaDB is glibc 2.4 (available in Ubuntu Hardy or later).

The most up-to-date documentation of Portable MariaDB is here.

The sources are here.

Why use Portable MariaDB?

• It's small (not bloated). Fast to dowload, fast to extract, fast to install. Quick size comparison: mariadb-5.2.9-Linux-i686.tar.gz is 144 MB, the corresponding Portable MariaDB .tbz2 is less than 6 MB.
• It's portable: does not interfere with other MySQL server installations on the same machine.
• It's self-contained and consistent: copy the database and the configuration in a single directory from one machine to another.

Installation

To run Portable MariaDB, you need a Linux system with glibc 2.4 (e.g. Ubuntu Hardy) or later. 32-bit and 64-bit systems are fine. For 64-bit systems you need the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed. You also need Perl.

  $ cd /tmp  # Or any other with write access.
  $ BASE=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pts/portable-mariadb/master/release
  $ #OLD: wget -O portable-mariadb.tbz2 $BASE/portable-mariadb-5.2.9.tbz2
  $ wget -O portable-mariadb.tbz2 $BASE/portable-mariadb-5.5.46.tbz2
  $ tar xjvf portable-mariadb.tbz2
  $ chmod 700 /tmp/portable-mariadb  # For security.
  $ /tmp/portable-mariadb/mariadb_init.pl stop-set-root-password

Usage

For security, don't do anything as root.

  $ cd /tmp/portable-mariadb
  $ ./mariadb_init.pl restart
  Connect with: mysql --socket=/tmp/portable-mariadb/mysqld.sock --user=root --database=test --password
  Connect with: mysql --host=127.0.0.1 --user=root --database=test --password

Feel free to take a look at /tmp/portable-mariadb/my.cnf, make modifications, and restart mysqld so that the modifications take effect.

Security

By default, connections are accepted from localhost (Unix domain socket and TCP) only, all MySQL users are refused (except if a password has been set for root above), and root has unrestricted access. Unix permissions (such as the chmod 700 above) are protecting against data theft and manipulation on the file level.

It is strongly recommended to change the password of root to a non-empty, strong password before populating the database.

Java support

Java clients with JDBC (MySQL Connector/J) are fully supported. Please note that Java doesn't support Unix doman socket, so make sure in my.cnf that mysqld listens on a TCP port. Please make sure you have ?characterEncoding=UTF8 specified in your JDBC connection URL, otherwise some non-ASCII, non-Latin-1 characters would be converted to ?.

Unicode support

Just as with MariaDB. All encodings and collations are supported. The latin1 encoding is the default, which can be changed in my.cnf.

Language support

All natural languages (of MariaDB) are supported for error messages. Set the `language' flag in my.cnf accordingly. English is the default.

How to try the latest MariaDB on Linux

This blog post explains how to download and start the bleeding edge MariaDB on a fairly recent 32-bit or 64-bit Linux system, for trial and development, the most straightforward way, without overwriting an existing MySQL installation or its data.

MariaDB is an improved, backward compatible, drop-in replacement of the MySQL Database Server, by Michael "Monty" Widenius, the original author of MySQL.

Please note that parts of this blog post are obsolete. See also the new blog post.

The simplest download and startup instructions for MariaDB 5.2.1 for 32-bit (i386, i686) Linux systems is the following:

# Stop any MySQL server currently running.
$ wget -O /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2 \
  http://pts-mini-gpl.googlecode.com/files/mariadb-compact-5.2.1-beta-linux-i386.tbz2
$ cd /tmp
$ tar xjvf mariadb-compact.tbz2
$ cd mariadb-compact
$ ./bin/mysqld --datadir=$PWD/data --pid-file=$PWD/mysqld.pid \
  --socket=$PWD/mysqld.sock --language=$PWD/share/mysql/english \
  --log-error=/proc/self/stderr
...

To stop the server, press Ctrl-Backslash, Enter in the window mysqld_safe is running, and wait 15 seconds for the process to exit.

To connect to the server, install the MySQL client. (e.g. with $ sudo apt-get install mysql-client on an Ubuntu system), and then run

$ mysql --socket=/tmp/mariadb-compact/mysqld.sock --user=root --database=test

or

$ mysql --host=127.0.0.1 --user=root --database=test

to connect. Please note that mariadb-compact comes with insecure default settings: it lets anyone connect as user root (on TCP 127.0.0.1:3306 (but not on other IP addresses) and on the Unix socket as well) without a password. Please use the appropriate mysqladmin commands (or modify the tables mysql.user, mysql.host and mysql.db directly) to set up access restrictions. use the --skip-networking flag of mysqld to prevent it from listening on TCP ports (not even 127.0.0.1:3306).

FYI Here is how mariadb-compact.tbz2 was created from the official MariaDB Linux binaries. The official download was located on http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB:Download http://askmonty.org/wiki/MariaDB:Download:MariaDB_5.2.1-beta, and then the following commands were executed:

$ wget -O /tmp/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz \
  http://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/MariaDB/mariadb-5.2.1-beta/\
  kvm-bintar-hardy-x86/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz
$ mkdir -p /tmp/mariadb-preinst
$ cd /tmp/mariadb-preinst
$ tar xzvf /tmp/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686/\
  {bin/mysqld{,_safe},bin/my_print_defaults,scripts/mysql_install_db,\
  share/mysql/english/errmsg.sys,share/fill_help_tables.sql,\
  share/mysql_fix_privilege_tables.sql,share/mysql_system_tables.sql,\
  share/mysql_system_tables_data.sql,share/mysql_test_data_timezone.sql}
$ cd mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686
$ strip -s bin/mysqld
$ ./scripts/mysql_install_db --basedir="$PWD" --force --datadir="$PWD"/data
$ rm -rf scripts
$ rm -f share/*.sql
$ cd ..
$ mv mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686 mariadb-compact
$ tar cjvf /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2 mariadb-compact
$ rm -rf /tmp/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-i686.tar.gz
$ rm -rf /tmp/mariadb-preinst
$ ls -l /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2 
-rw-r--r-- 1 pts pts 4194393 Aug  8 18:10 /tmp/mariadb-compact.tbz2

The script mysql_install_db creates the initial databases and tables (e.g. the mysql.user table used for authentication) in the data directory.

All the other commands above just extract the absolute minimum necessary files from the official binary distribution, strip the binaries, and create a small .tbz2 archive.

Please note that the binaries in the official binary distributions are dynamically linked:

$ ldd bin/mysqld
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xb7727000)
        libnsl.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnsl.so.1 (0xb76f9000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/librt.so.1 (0xb76f0000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libpthread.so.0 (0xb76d6000)
        libwrap.so.0 => /lib/libwrap.so.0 (0xb76cd000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb76c9000)
        libresolv.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libresolv.so.2 (0xb76b5000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libcrypt.so.1 (0xb7683000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7590000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xb756a000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7425000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7728000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7407000)

It would be straightforward to create the 64-bit version of mariadb-compact.tbz2, by starting from a different official binary distribution (http://ftp.rediris.es/mirror/MariaDB/mariadb-5.2.1-beta/kvm-bintar-hardy-amd64/mariadb-5.2.1-beta-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz), and modifying the the commands above appropriately.

A newer version (5.2.9) of this precompiled 32-bit Linux MariaDB is new available: http://pts-mini-gpl.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/portable-mariadb.release/portable-mariadb.tbz2. Here is the shell script which generated it from the official MariaDB 5.2.9 sources: http://code.google.com/p/pts-mini-gpl/source/browse/trunk/portable-mariadb/build-mariadb.sh. Here is the newer blog post: http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2011/11/announcing-portable-mariadb-small.html.

Sex, Unix style

My instruction sequence compilation of the traditional Unix sex theme:

date; touch; kiss; grep; strip; unzip; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; uptime; gasp; umount; sleep

Screen blanking, DPMS, screen saver control and timeout settings on X11

This blog post explains how to blank and unblank the screen manually, how to activate and deactivate display power saving (DPMS), and how to specify inactivity timeouts for screen blanking on X11. The examples were tried with Ubuntu Jaunty, X.Org 7.4 and icewm. This blog post doesn't explain how to make your changes permanent after logout, or how to change your GNOME settings.

The results below may be distorted if gnome-screensaver is running. To get rid of it, do this:

$ gconftool-2 --type boolean -s /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/screensaver/start_screensaver false
$ killall gnome-screensaver

Without setting start_screensaver to false above, gnome-settings-daemon would restart gnome-screensaver whenever a GNOME application gets started. (Firefox a GNOME Terminal is GNOME applications in Ubuntu Jaunty, but icewm and xterm aren't.)

X11 supports two distinct features for power saving when the user is away from the computer: screen blanking and power saving. Confusingly enough, the man page for xset uses the term screen saver instead of screen blanking. In our terminology, screen blanking is a feature to display a blank (solid black) screen after long enough user inactivity. However, screen saver is a program which gets started upon long enough user inactivity, which draws some simple animation on the screen, and asks the user's password before letting him back to his screen and applications. Power saving (DPMS turns the display off or puts it to some power-saving mode after long enough user inactivity. In power saving mode the display doesn't show anything, but it consumes much less power, see the DPMS link above for typical watt values for the power-saving modes standby, suspend and off (and also in the mode on, when power saving is inactive). User inactivity means that the user doesn't use the keyboard or the mouse for a configurable number of seconds. The typical default inactivity timeouts are around 2 minutes. By default, the X server disables screen blanking and power saving as soon as the user presses a key or moves the mouse. From now on we assume that there is no screen saver running, or its timeout is set to be high enough so it won't ever trigger. Screen blanking and power saving are independent features, they have to be configured independently.

How to set up the timeouts

• To disable screen blanking, run xset s off
• To make the screen blank after 600 seconds of user inactivity, run xset s 600
To put the display to standby after 100 seconds, to suspend after 200 seconds, and turn it off after 300 seconds, run xset dpms 100 200 300
• To disable power saving, run xset dpms 0 0 0
• To make the screen blanking display thee X11 logo on a blue background instead of displaying a solid black screen, run xset s noblank
• To make the screen blanking display a solid black screen (default), run xset s blank

How to change the screen state immediately

• To blank the screen, run xset s activate
• To unblank the screen, run xset s reset
• To turn the screen off, run xset dmps force off
• To activate the suspend power-saving mode (good savings, good resume time), run xset dpms force suspend
• To activate the standby power-saving mode (minimal savings, very quick resume time), run xset dpms force standby
• To turn the display on, run xset dpms force on; xset s reset (the latter is necessary because the screen was blanked automatically when power saving was activated).

How to prevent screen blanking and power saving in MPlayer

Most media player applications disable blanking and power saving while they are playing a video. To enable this functionality in MPlayer, start it with mplayer -stop-xscreensaver or add the line stop-xscreensaver=1 to your ~/.mplayer/config . By doing so, MPlayer will simulate user activity (just as if the user has moved the mouse) upon startup and then each 30 seconds. So this will prevent the screen from blanking or going to power saving mode if all your timeouts are larger than 30 seconds. Please note that the name of the flag is confusing, because its effect isn't related to screen savers, it just simulates user activity. If a screen saver is running, it may or may not pick up the simulated activity generated by MPlayer. To prevent screen saver activation in this case, you may have to run mplayer -heartbeat-cmd "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" or mplayer -heartbeat-cmd "gnome-screensaver-command -p" .