Change MySQL default character set to UTF-8 in my.cnf?

Question

Currently we are using the following commands in PHP to set the character set to UTF-8 in our application.

Since this is a bit of overhead, we\'d like to set this a

Answer 1

I also have found out that after setting default-character-set = utf8 under [mysqld] title, MySQL 5.5.x would not start under Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin).