Debian

Security Notice
While the information on this site currently remains available for reference purposes, you are strongly recommended to use at least the latest MariaDB release in your series. For more information see the summary post MariaDB Security Updates or ask Open Query.

Preparation
Click on the distro and MySQL/MariaDB version of your choice below, and follow the instructions for setting up the repository files. Please run
sudo apt-get update

For any server installation, simply
sudo apt-get install mysql-server (or mariadb-server)
For client connectivity,
sudo apt-get install mysql-client (or mariadb-client)
MariaDB 5.1 has a separate mariadb-test package.
All dependencies will be automatically resolved if you install using the repository, including backward compatibility from MariaDB 5.1 (which use a .so.16 client library) to apps that are still linked against a .so.15

Note: You could download the debs manually and install locally with dpkg -i, however dpkg can’t resolve external dependencies (like libdbd-mysql) and thus often fails. Just use the repo, it’s easier!
Upgrade

You must use sudo apt-get dist-upgrade since there is a new mysql-server-core package in the dependency mix (both for 5.0 and 5.1). Regular upgrade does not allow new packages to be installed even for a dependency. Don’t worry, the dist-upgrade term is misleading, it does not upgrade you to the next distro version.

Upgrading from 5.0 (stock distro or OurDelta) to 5.1 should be ok, we’ve tested this just with the packages. Naturally, there may be aspects in your application that need to be checked.

In some cases we have to make considerable effort to make builds work on older or really new distro releases; as you know, distros themselves don’t bother with it so we have to deal with any breakage. Debian 4 (Etch) is getting old, but we’ll try and keep it going for a bit longer as we know that people still have it deployed.

For new releases, we tend to create our VMs when they’re in their beta or RC stage, and we try to have packages out around the time of their release proper (depending on any problems we find, and our build schedule).