Well the first part of my day was spent researching how to remove MySQL to install MariaDB and the second part of my day was spent trying to reinstall MySQL cause something was messed up. So now I come to the masses for some help.

I have a box with cPanel/WHM on it. CentOS 5.6 64 bit. I have upgraded (through WHM) MySQL to 5.5.24 and that was successful. After some research, the options I found were an intimidating Linux command with pipes greps and dashes, and another command

yum remove mysql

I tried that out and it appeared to remove mysql.....ish. I tried installing MariaDB from this instructions page and it started to do it's thing and then came the zillions of errors (here's a small sample):

Transaction Check Error:
  file /etc/init.d/mysql from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysql_convert_table_format from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysql_install_db from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysqlbug from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysqld_multi from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysqld_safe from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysqldumpslow from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/share/man/man1/innochecksum.1.gz from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/share/man/man1/my_print_defaults.1.gz from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/share/man/man1/myisam_ftdump.1.gz from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/share/man/man1/myisamchk.1.gz from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64
  file /usr/share/man/man1/myisamlog.1.gz from install of MariaDB-server-5.5.25-1.i386 conflicts with file from package MySQL-server-5.5.24-1.cp.1132.x86_64

So it appeared that MySQL wasn't removed correctly. I've read from different tutorials given on different sites that to install MariaDB, you had to uninstall/remove MySQL and there weren't any commands given on how to do this.

Does anyone know how to "safely" remove MySQL on a WHM/cPanel server so that I can install MariaDB?

Here's my repo file in case anyone needs to know...

# MariaDB repository list - created 2012-07-10 17:09 UTC
# http://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/
[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/5.5/centos5-x86
gpgcheck=1