I've just wasted a couple of hours trying to figure out why my mac keeps getting the response "Can't connect to MySQL server on 'server'" when trying to connect to MySQL on my new vmware Ubuntu setup.

The solution is rather simple!

Open up your MySQL configuration file and find the --bind-address directive. It's most likely that it'll be set to 127.0.0.1 which makes MySQL listen for connections only via the loopback IP.

Comment out this line and save the configuration file. Restarting MySQL didn't seem enough to make this work for me so I had to restart the OS.