Cannot configure MySQL

[Chris Lale <chrislale@untrammelled.co.uk>]

Hello.

I am trying to build a Live CD containing a website delivered by Apache using
PHP and MySQL. My host system is running Lenny.

I can create an image in which Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL are all installed and
behaving correctly. I want to configure MySQL in the image so that there is
already a root user password and an existing database.

I created the initial image and ran it in VirtualBox. In VirtualBox I
successfully created a password for the MySQL root user and imported the
database from a .sql file. I tarred up /var/lib/mysql/ and /etc/mysql/ to
preserve ownership, and transferred them to config/chroot_local-includes/ on the
host system using scp. I untarred them as root to preserve ownership. The owner
and group names still corresponded exactly with the originals.

I created a new image and mysqld failed to start. The problem may be that some
files have changed owners and groups in the image. Eg on the host
config/chroot_local-includes/var/lib/mysql/ibdata1 has owner "mysql-MySQL
Server" and group "mysql", but in the image /var/lib/mysql/ibdata1 has owner
"113" and group "118".

It looks like the ids are being transferred during the build rather than the
names, and any particular id may have a different name on the host and in the image.

I would be grateful if anyone could think of a way around this.
-- 
Chris.