Newbie MySQL Question

[kens]

I'm just starting to experiment with Zabbix and I need a complete dummy's guide to MySQL. (The mysql site has a comprehensive manual but I really need something really basic, I don't what to become a DBA or MySQL developer) Could somone please point me to some simple recipies for doing some really basic things:-

1) adding a user to MySQL called zabbix and allowing that user to access the zabbix tables

2) Verifying that the zabbix tables have been created and showing their content - just to verify that there might be some data in there.

I have followed the installation instructions and I think I have created the zabbix tables in MySQL. I did that using the supplied script as the root user. I get an empty page when I access the zabbix web page on my test machine.

If I try to log in to mysql as the zabbix user I get

mysql -u zabbix -p zabbix
Enter password:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'zabbix'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Hence my questions about MySQL - I suspect the zabbix user does not exist, even though I did follow some instructions on creating one.

also the httpd error log says

[client 172.16.0.25] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function mysql_pconnect() in /var/www/html/zabbix/include/db.inc.php on line 38

I suspect I may have a package missing

Thanks in advance

Ken