However, that too interprets the config files incorrectly. This should show you that your data directory, port, socket, and any other settings you've made are being correctly read. In addition, there is no password for root. A documentation section that goes into some detail about the initial permissions is here. The organizational concept each mysql server works under is that it has a number of databases , and each database will in turn have a number of possibly related tables .
Access rights can be different for different databases or even different tables.
The details of maintaining a mysql server are beyond the scope of this document. However, the official mysql docs are actually fairly understandable, accurate, and up to date. So even though we share filesystems with nfs between solaris and linux machines, you will not be able to create a database on one, and later successfully run the mysql daemon on the other. It won't recognize the data. This of course has nothing to do with where you can make queries from.