I'm having a problem with a MySQL UDF function (mychem.sourceforge.net) that's dependent on a large library (openbabel.org) which is in turn plugin based. The problem is that the format plugins to openbabel doesn't seem to load in MySQL 5.1 and I suspect it might be due to the plugin_dir setting. I have set plugin_dir to /usr/lib/ which is the location for both libmychem.so and libopenbabel.so as well as the directory openbabel that contains the format plugins. Is there a way to turn off the plugin_dir restriction in MySQL (preferably without compiling MySQL from sources) so that I can test this hypothesis or do you have a different idea on what might cause the problem? All this is done on Ubuntu 10.04 (but I had the same kind of problems on 8.04, where I managed to get it working after a lot of steps that I unfortunately have forgotten...)
I have turned off apparmor during testing and it doesn't help either.