Siber wrote:I haven't the foggiest, but my colleague does. How do I check that?
Edit: emailed him and he said redhat 9.0... don't laugh too hard.
Heh... in that case, I'm not sure what your best course of action would be here. The version of MySQL in your distro's repository is probably rather old, as Redhat 9 has not been supported for quite some time. If you want a vaguely modern version of MySQL to run on that box you'll probably need to build it from source, unless you can find someone who has current pre-built binaries for Redhat 9. MySQL still provides current binaries for Redhat Enterprise Linux 3, which was released around the same time as Redhat 9; you may be able to use those (but no guarantees).
Linux has come a long way since Redhat 9; you really ought to consider upgrading to something more modern. If you want to stay in the Redhat family, your choices would be the latest Fedora (if you don't mind being a bit bleeding edge, with everything good and bad that implies); Redhat Enterprise Linux (if you don't mind paying for it); or CentOS (a free, community-supported, re-branded version of Redhat Enterprise Linux). For sheer ease of use I recommend Ubuntu (but if you're already familiar with Redhat, be aware that Ubuntu does some things differently, so there will be a bit of a learning curve). Debian is also an excellent choice if you're thinking of turning this into a production server, but if you don't already have in-house expertise with it you're probably better off with one of the other options.