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MySQL GUI Tools (Query Browser, Administrator) for Fedora 13

In Fedora Linux, the mysql-gui-tools package provides the graphical (or GUI) clients to query and administer a MySQL database – useful alternatives to the command line client.

While I’m very comfortable with the mysql command line client, I do switch to the GUI query browser to add/edit stored procedures/functions.

“yum install mysql-gui-tools” was the simplest command to install the GUI tools for MySQL in Fedora Linux. But in Fedora 13, this results in “No package mysql-gui-tools available”.

So what happened here?

Why Fedora 13 repositories don’t have mysql-gui-tools package ?
The reason for this is explained in a bug report here. In a nutshell, the explanation is, the MySQL GUI tools is purposely removed from the Fedora 13 repositories because they have been buggy! Fair enough – it has crashed on me many a times.

But what is the alternative? The thread in the bug report suggests that it will be replaced with MySQL Workbench. That’s great! MySQL Workbench has many more features. So now can I issue a ‘yum-install mysql-workbench’ to have it installed on Fedora 13? The answer is no. This is because the bug report sums up with the following note:

mysql-workbench has not finished its review yet.  this is due to the enormous
amount of work needed as the mysql team follows lots of bad practices.

Until we can cleanly and sanely package mysql-workbench there will be nothing
available on fedora. 

The above reply is dated June 17, 2010. A 'no release date' left me desperate to look around (google).

The solution
There is always a solution and Google leads us to it. In a nutshell, I installed MySQL Workbench  from the Remi repository. A quick install of MySQL Workbench, on Fedora 13, is as follows:

• Login as root
• Open a terminal window in GNOME/KDE or switch to the command line
• Issue the command:
  rpm –import http://rpms.famillecollet.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-remi
• Next, issue the command:
  yum install http://rpms.famillecollet.com/remi-release-13.rpm
• Open the file named remi.repo, found in the directory /etc/yum.repos.d, in a text editor (say vi) and change line no. 5 from:
  enabled=0 to enabled=1
  This will enable the [remi] repository.
• Finally issue:
  yum install mysql-workbench
  to install MySQL Workbench on Fedora 13.

Henceforth, MySQL Workbench can be launched via a terminal window by issuing mysql-workbench or it can be found under Applications >Programming in GNOME.

MySQL GUI Tools (Query Browser, Administrator) for Fedora 13, 8.4 out of 10 based on 7 ratings
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