Trying to get multiple mysql instances running on Ubuntu dev box I'm trying to get multiple instances of mysql running on a dev box for some testing.  This guy is running ubuntu so the setup's a little different than our production setups.

I'd like to find the easiest way to basically sudo service start   and have it use a different .cnf init file (other than the distro default location of /etc/mysql/my.cnf

Any ideas?
Have you looked into the mysqld_multi tool ?

This will allow you to run different configurations and different distros using the same configuration file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf) and you could adjust the init.d script to use the mysqld_multi commands instead of mysqld.

Another tool might be mysql sandbox, but I've never used that personally on any distro.