An old and good friend of mine kept telling me that MariaDB is faster and better that the good old MySQL, that wince Oracle got it, MySQL is not what it used to be. So I decided to try it.

I went to MariaDB website, to “Repository Configuration Tool”, chose my mirror, imported the GPG key, apt-get update, apt-get install mariadb-server and… PANIC!

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 mariadb-server : Depends: mariadb-server-5.5 but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

The ideea is that I am using the Dotdeb repository and… at a first look those two are not compatible.

Solution:

I created a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/mariadb with the following contents:

Package: *
Pin: origin "ftp.igh.cnrs.fr"
Pin-Priority: 999

*) ftp.igh.cnrs.fr is the miiror I chose

I removed the libmysqlclient18 package which is apparently the incompatible one than ran:

apt-get install mariadb-server

The result:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  mysql-client-5.5 mysql-client-core-5.5 mysql-server mysql-server-5.5 mysql-server-core-5.5
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libmariadbclient18 libmysqlclient18 mariadb-client-5.5 mariadb-client-core-5.5 mariadb-common mariadb-server mariadb-server-5.5 mariadb-server-core-5.5
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

So, right now, this blog, and about 30 other vhosts run very smooth on MariaDB, no problem so far.