While the bulk of Imulus development takes place in a .NET environment we all still enjoy geeking out from time to time. As a previous Ruby on Rails app developer (mainly front end) I have a fascination in staying up on RoR as well as other open sources frameworks and languages. Obviously this includes a vast number of options now days (RoR, Cake, Django, etc). However, the bulk of them have one common thread, MySQL.

Unfortunately for quite some time getting MySQL to run on Mac OS X 10.5 was somewhat of a pain in the ass. In comparison to some database setups typing in a few terminal commands is no big deal, however, compared with installing MySQL on 10.4 Tiger the 10.5 install was a huge step back. Tiger had a simple PKG installer that once run offered a simple start/stop MySQL preference pain within OS X’s system preferences. However, with the release of Leopard this prefpane was no longer functional. Luckily the issue has been fixed!

The bug has been addressed and there is now a prefpane that can be downloaded and used with version 5 of MySQL. Further it also seems that new versions of MySQL have this fix implemented by default. Great work MySQL community, it’s always nice to see frustrating issues fixed! Especially those that will help new users get a chance to try the product without jumping through hoops.