Package installed as normal, starting mysql by running /etc/rc.d/mysql said the server started ok but in fact it didn't start at all. Took me 2 hours to figure out that is was a permissions issue / writing the logs to the wrong place.
The package seems to want to write some logs to /var/lib/mysql namely <host>.err where I eventually found a log of the problem rather than where I'd have expected it to be /var/log/mysql (just a blank error log). I resolved it by chmoding mysql.mysql /var/lib/mysql. Not sure this was the best thing but it allowed myqsl to start.