+--------------------------------------------------+
| Upgrade MySQL from 3.23 (RedHat) to 4.0 (Debian) |
+--------------------------------------------------+

(c) 2005 Alessandro De Zorzi <adezorzi AT rhx DOT it>

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;

A copy of the license from http://www.fsf.org.

Create special user debian-sys-maint
====================================

  Please create in your old MySQL installation (database mysql table user)
  the user debian-sys-maint. Set the password equal new debian-sys-maint
  in the new MySQL installation, search the password in the new MySQL database.

  mysql> use mysql
  
  mysql> select User,Password from user where user='debian-sys-maint';
  +------------------+------------------+
  | User             | Password         |
  +------------------+------------------+
  | debian-sys-maint | 4**3****4******c |
  +------------------+------------------+

  Stop the old MySQL server.

Copy the databases
==================

  tar cvfz all_mysql.tar.gz /var/lib/mysql

  Move the tarball and remove existing DBs in new /var/lib/mysql
  before extract the files.

  tar xvfz all_mysql.tar.gz

Fix
===

  Be sure mysql user can read and write all database 
  directories and files. (ls -l ; chmod ; chgroup could
  be useful to fix it).

  Restart the new MySQL server, if works:

  mysql_fix_privilege_tables --password=secret

  secret = your root old MySQL password

  (If you see some Duplicate column name warnings you can ignore them).