“Connection for controluser as defined in your configuration failed” with phpMyAdmin in XAMPP

Question

I have just installed XAMPP on my Windows XP machine, and I get an error saying:

Connection for controluser as defined in your configuration failed.

Answer 1

If you got here and you are using Debian/Ubuntu (or any other dpkg based distro), execute the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin

The phpmyadmin package contains the script to perform this operation for you, all it needs is a user with permissions. sudo is not required if you're logged in as root, of course.

EDIT: It might be worth trying to drop the current phpmyadmin user.