Switching from MySQL to MariaDB on Ubuntu 14.04

I’ve known about MariaDB for a while, but because I wanted my development machines to match my production environments, I just stayed with MySQL. Today I found out that the production environments switched to MariaDB, so I searched around the internet to find out how to do the switch on my development machines. All are running Ubuntu 14.04, so I thought that as long as I could do it on one, it would be easy to do the rest. Well, that would be the case if there were good instructions somewhere, but I had to piece together a solution that worked for me, as I was getting error messages after following the advice of others.

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