On a clean install of pinstripe, you can't start mysqld.
I get:

[root@fungi]# safe_mysqld  
/usr/bin/safe_mysqld: my_print_defaults: command not found
Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
mysqld daemon ended

running /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld start dies without any information, which
is even worse.

Just grepping through safe_bysqld, it appears to be looking for params from
my.cfg.