In trying to set up the Rails stack on two new Mac Minis, we discovered that the latest MySQL, version 5.0.26, and the Ruby gem do not seem to get along—after every ~10 requests, you get a “lost connection during query” error. Much frustration occurred until we were able to eliminate user error by duplicating the problem on the second Mac Mini.

The version I was using on my Macbook Pro is 5.0.19, so we decided to use that instead. But, turns out you can’t just download and install 5.0.19. First you have to find old versions of MySQL (not an easy feat in itself), just to discover that older versions won’t install over a newer, already installed version. You have to first uninstall 5.0.26… but Apple doesn’t provide a package uninstaller. Since it’s not an application, AppZapper does not work. Instead, a command line utility called OSXPM is necessary. I love my Mac, but after this experience I really loathed Apple for not providing a proper package uninstaller.

Once you have 5.0.26 uninstalled and 5.0.19 installed, you can recompile your MySQL gem and get on with your work. Let my pain be your gain…