When I ran mysqld I would get:

> 090127 10:00:30 InnoDB: Operating system error number 13 in a file
> operation.
> InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to
> InnoDB: the directory.
> InnoDB: File name ./ibdata1
> InnoDB: File operation call: ‘open’.
> InnoDB: Cannot continue operation.

Finally I looked in /etc/mysql/my.cnf and figured out that my bind-address needed to be updated. So took about an hour to figure that one out. It would be best if I could just leave it to localhost for the bind_address but I can not do that right now.

For others where it is not the bind_address it could be number of other things. I started reading through this thread: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/216042.  It was very helpful to think through the scenarios.