Comment 19 for bug 973951

Sometimes I am able to reproduce this issue, and sometimes, MySQL installs perfectly.

The following steps seem to consistently install MySQL, but I can't be sure due to the sporadic nature of the problem...

First, I tried to remove MySQL...
$ sudo apt-get --yes autoremove --purge mysql-server
    The following packages will be REMOVED:
    mysql-server* mysql-server-5.5* mysql-server-core-5.5*

But there were a bunch of dependencies left over. So I specifically uninstalled mysql-client-5.5 to remove the dependencies...
$ sudo apt-get autoremove --purge mysql-client-5.5
    The following packages will be REMOVED:
        libdbd-mysql-perl* libmysqlclient18* mysql-client-5.5* mysql-client-core-5.5* mysql-common* mysql-server* mysql-server-5.5*
        mysql-workbench* mysql-workbench-data*

Then, I removed any files that may have been left...
$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mysql ~/.mysql /etc/mysql

Finally, I reinstalled MySQL...
$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server

I've tried the above steps quite a few times, and MySQL always uninstalls and installs without giving an error. (However, I'm not sure if that means anything. It seems that if you try enough times, it eventually installs fine.)