Firstly let me tell you that ubuntu does NOT use Openoffice.org it use GO-OO and it has been discontinued and joined libreoffice.

Go-oo shares much of its goals and philosophy with The Document Foundation's LibreOffice project, we're therefore supporting LibreOffice since it's inception, and are in the process of merging most of our patches over, as well as migrating to Document Foundation infrastructure. Going forward, the Go-oo project will be discontinued in favor of LibreOffice.

So upgrading to OOo will result in a serious loss of functionality that's why I recommend libreoffice(You Can install by Applications -> software Center -> Edit(menu) -> software sources -> Other Software (tab) -> Add then paste (without quotes) 'ppa:libreoffice/ppa'then reload when prompted and install libreoffice and libreoffice-gnome from the software center .

If you still want to use vanila Openoffice.org you could download the .deb from here and install them manually after uninstalling all the openoffice packages from Synaptic.

What i've read on that tutorial is this:

This step is not necessary if you were prompted to create a mysql root password during MySQL installation.

I recently reinstalled lamp and i remember having been prompted for MySQL root password during the installation. Most likely you have set your password already. If you don't remember having done so, try to change the password to a new one assuming that the default password ('') has been used:

mysqladmin -u root -p '' password '<new_password>'