Hi Olaf! Since there has not been any change on the mysql_install_db.sh script regarding this for long, I thought that such output message was normal and that the error log would be as it says in /var/lib/mysql.
But on Debian it is not and you are right, error log goes to /var/log/mysql/error.log. The following permits to confirm this behavior (WARNING this delete mariadb data): 1/ in a first terminal: $ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/mysql/* $ sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db 2/ in a second terminal (quickly after this last command): $ sudo chown -R root:root /var/lib/mysql/mysql The last command makes the creation of MariaDB Server system table fail because mysql_install_db can't write into /var/lib/mysql/mysql and error log goes to /var/log/mysql/error.log I will open an issue on Jira and link this bug report to it. Thanks again, Faustin