I wanted to get a look at MySQL 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04 just out of curiosity. And based on this article it certainly looked like installation should be simple and straightforward. So I fired up an AWS EC2 micro server running Ubuntu 14.04 (64-bit), logged into my pristine instance (via PuTTY), and issued the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get build-dep mysql-server-5.6

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.6

(The first two commands were desperation moves, since simply running apt-get install alone had previously not worked. But even with all three commands, the install step still did not work.)

At the point where I expected, based on the article referenced above, to see this output from the final command:

mysql start/running, process 2355  

Setting up libhtml-template-perl (2.95-1) ...  

Setting up mysql-common-5.6 (5.6.16-1~exp1) ...  

Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-0ubuntu6) ...  

Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-16) ...  

I got this instead:

start: Job failed to start  

invoke-rc.d: initscript mysql, action "start" failed.  

dpkg: error processing package mysql-server-5.6 (--configure):  

 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1  

Setting up libhtml-template-perl (2.95-1) ...  

Setting up mysql-common-5.6 (5.6.16-1~exp1) ...  

Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-0ubuntu6) ...  

Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-16) ...  

Errors were encountered while processing:  

 mysql-server-5.6  

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Can anyone see what went wrong?