Two root users in mysql or phpmyadmin, what does this mean?

[saga]

Today I backed up files from 1.8.1, deleted /opt/lampp, and installed 1.8.3.

In the earlier version, when you would run

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/opt/lampp/lampp security

, there was an opportunity to set a root password for mysql. Now in 1.8.3-4, it says:

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MySQL has a root passwort set. Fine! :)

-- this was only a few minutes after installing, when I had not set any passwords yet.

So I went to phpmyadmin, and it let me in without a password, and I was going to set a password for root in the "users" tab. However there are two users named root, one for 'localhost' and one for 'linux'.

Why are there two? What does each one mean (or in other words, how is host 'linux' different from host 'localhost')? And which one of these is the one that would have been set by the older 'security' dialog?

I searched on the web and here and did not find any explanation. My OS is Debian 6 Sqeeze.

[saga]

Following up on my own post above.

Phpmyadmin let me in as root with no authentication. I made a new database, an admin user and an application user, and set passwords for all of these plus pma and the two root accounts. Phpmyadmin immediately stopped working.

Found some semi-relevant web pages and was directed to:

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/opt/lampp/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

And it had blanks for the root@localhost and the pma@localhost users' passwords. So I filled in the new ones that had just gone in the database, and this got the phpmyadmin working again.

Now however, it still does not require authentication. In the old version it would require a logon and password. How can I make that happen?


Later update: In that config file I just had to change the authentication type:

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// $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie';

This got it back to a regular login, and made it OK to delete the hardcoded plaintext password in the config file.

Still wondering about 'hosts'. Is this the same as servers? There is a page in the interface saying no server configured, but I'm not clear on what this affects.