How To Fix [ERROR] Fatal error: Can't open and lock privilege tables: Table 'mysql.host' doesn't exist

Time to time on new installs of MySQL I encounter this error which is luckily very easy to fix.

From the command line simply run:

mysql_install_db --user=mysql

You may also encounter this error in part when trying to start/stop/restart the service and see:

ERROR! MySQL server PID file could not be found!

...which usually reveals itself in the err log in /var/lib/mysql