I have a freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server and I installed Percona server from their official repositories.

Trouble is it will not start!

mysql-error.log shows nothing obvious.

121129 12:16:54 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql/
121129 12:16:54 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: Using Linux native AIO
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 12.0G
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
121129 12:16:54 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda.
121129 12:16:55  InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start
121129 12:16:56 Percona XtraDB (http://www.percona.com) 1.1.8-rel29.1 started; log sequence number 1598476
121129 12:16:56 [Note] Server hostname (bind-address): '0.0.0.0'; port: 3306
121129 12:16:56 [Note]   - '0.0.0.0' resolves to '0.0.0.0';
121129 12:16:56 [Note] Server socket created on IP: '0.0.0.0'.
121129 12:16:56 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events
121129 12:16:56 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: ready for connections.
Version: '5.5.28-29.1-log'  socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysql.sock'  port: 3306  Percona Server (GPL), Release 29.1
121129 12:16:56 [Note] Event Scheduler: scheduler thread started with id 1

And the syslog shows...

Nov 29 12:17:07 V-PF-SQL1 /etc/init.d/mysql[2206]: 0 processes alive and '/usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping' resulted in
Nov 29 12:17:07 V-PF-SQL1 /etc/init.d/mysql[2206]: #007/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
Nov 29 12:17:07 V-PF-SQL1 /etc/init.d/mysql[2206]: error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)'
Nov 29 12:17:07 V-PF-SQL1 /etc/init.d/mysql[2206]: Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' exists!
Nov 29 12:17:07 V-PF-SQL1 /etc/init.d/mysql[2206]: 

The socket file is being created and I can access the server NOT using the socket using

mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3306 -u root --pPASSWORD