Reset MySQL root password Ubuntu/Debian / Linux mint

I wanted to get my portfolio up and running and saw this great plugin for Wordpress which I thought was kook to showcase tool. The only problem was that it needed Wordpress to operate, and I thought sure not a problem and used apt-get install to download install it on my Mint.

After installing the wrong version I struggled installing Wordpress, only to realize that I had to pull down the tar.gz and upgrade Wordpress manually. Well here is where all the trouble started, for some reason I had forgotten my MySQL root password and I had forgotten the the only user that I had created to create users and create databases.

I went online and tried different methods without much success, and finally found one that worked with my Mint 14 setup:

1.  sudo dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.5

2. Enter the password for root as part of the sudo command

3. Enter the new password for root for MySQL

And that's it, the password has been updated. Now to get into MySQL punch this in mysql -u root -p