I was literally pulling my hair out , and must have re-installed apache and phpMyAdmin multiple times and tried multiple hosts..    The fucking wiki docs for phpMyAdmin say the configuration file config.inc.php should be in the same directory that index.php is in.  Actually according to those fucking docs theres multiple locations inside that tree  /, ../library, and you can create a directory called config and put the file there.   They say just copy the config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php and edit that file with your mysql settings..blah blah blah..  Sadly, all the forums and suggestions from those forums..all had you updating those files somewhere in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin tree as well.  WTF.  I’m sure each Linux distro might be a little different, but using Fedora 19.

Yeah none of that shit works at all..fucking wasted half my day on this crap..

The configuration file is in /etc/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php, updated that ..and tried it and bingo.