I am trying to uninstall php and phpmyadmin on my machine that has Linux Mint, but when I go to uninstall the database for phpmyadmin, in the panel that appears when installing and uninstalling phpmyadmin from the terminal I get this message:

An error occurred while deleting the database:
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user
'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Does anyone know what is going on?

1 Answer

debian-sys-maint is a system user that the package manager uses for performing administrative tasks. It seems you've either removed that user or changed the password. The password is stored on disk at /etc/mysql/debian.cnf.

Probably the best solution is to reconfigure the database server, probably with dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server or dpkg-reconfigure mariadb-server (although those are metapackages, so there's a chance you'd need to use the specific version such as dpkg-reconfigure mariadb-server-10.5 but offhand I don't think that will be needed).

Reconfiguring the package will cause the package manager to recreate the debian-sys-maint user and from there it will be able to remove the phpMyAdmin package.

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