Make sure that you have set utf8 as
default/server-character-set in your MySQL configuration (my.cnf)
before you start the installation process of OpenMeetings!
make sure MySQL is listening on TCP/IP connections!
To verify if MySQL connection is working: OpenMeetings will
automatically create all tables in the database and all tables
should have utf8 as encoding/collation!
If you encounter issues, you can drop the db and then run
the web based installer again