As you might already know, MariaDB is the alternative to Oracle MySQL. The MariaDB team mantains two releases right now, one that is compatible with MySQL called MariaDB 5.5 and a new one for brand new installations, MariaDB 10. We are going to migrate to MariaDB 5.5, which is the recommended for easy migrations without headaches.
I have tested this under Ubuntu 14.04. Open a shell, and type/paste the following instructions to do your migration:
sudo bash
apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xcbcb082a1bb943db
apt-get update
apt-get install mariadb-serverAnd everything is up and ready. You won't have to change even your database connection configuration, the applications that were using the MySQL driver will keep working perfectly.
And to finish the post, a warning, do not test this in live environment unless you have tested it properly!