I've heard great feedback on a few folks migrating production machines (including from this question), and I'd like to test the transition in our dev environment. Maria is apparently in the 11.10 repos, but there has to be more to it than just apt-get install; what else needs to be done to switch it out? Do the php5-mysql libraries work out-of-the proverbial box?
A quick google didn't turn up anything, so I was hoping someone could either point me to a good article, or lay out the steps in an answer here.
This article/tutorial may be of some help.
http://kb.askmonty.org/en/building-mariadb-on-ubuntu
According to Monty, (the creator), all php mysql libraries should work without any changes.