Please note that if you haven't changed over to MariaDB -
you should ...
But more to the point for this post - if you need to
reset your root mysql or mariadb password, the easiest way to do it on an Ubuntu platform is to run the following commands:
First, you need to know what version of mysql or MariaDB you have, so run this to search for the package name:
root@bazingah:/usr/local/bin# dpkg-query -S mariadb-server
mariadb-server-5.5: /usr/share/doc/mariadb-server-5.5/copyright
For MySQL users the command would be:
dpkg-query -S mysql-server
Once you have your package name, you can run the reconfigure command on it:
(in my example, the mariadb version is 5.5, which is a match for the MySQL version that is current: "mysql-server-5.5"
sudo dpkg-reconfigure mariadb-server-5.5