The screenshots explain everything, first I try to start it, and it won't, so I check the status, then I check the logs.
After following a number of previous suggestions that I founder around StackExchange, my.cnf contents are:
[mysqld] datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0 # Settings user and group are ignored when systemd is used. # If you need to run mysqld under a different user or group, # customize your systemd unit file for mariadb according to the # instructions in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd performance_schema=off innodb_buffer_pool_size=64MB innodb_purge_threads=0 [mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log pid-file=/var/run/mariadb/mariadb.pid # # include all files from the config directory # !includedir /etc/my.cnf.d 
