My goal is simply to get it running with no bells and whistles. No features; no rollbacks, etc. There are instructions to the right of me; Instructions to left of me. I am drowning in instructions. I don't know which ones to use.

My setup: Dell Inspiron 2500, Windows ME ======================== 1. I downloaded and installed MySQL. There were no problems.

2. Mysqlc works.

3. Mysqld gives the following error: Cannot initialize InnoDB as 'innodb_data_file_path' is not set. If you do not want to use transactional InnoDB tables, add a line skip-innodb to the [mysqld] section of init parameters in your my.cnf or my.ini. If you want to use InnoDB tables, add for example, innodb_data_file_path = /mysql/data/ibdata1:20M More information on setting the parameters you find in the manual.

4. Per the read me file, I ran winmysqladmin.exe. It asked for user name and password. I don't want either, but I entered: UN: joel, PW: igor

5. I tried mysqld again. Same message as in item 3 above.

6. Ran winmysqladmin.exe again. The program ran for 1/2 second and then dissapeared.

7. I tried mysqld-opt.exe. Nothing happened. Don't know if daemon is running or not. How do I know?