How can I make Joomla's pre-install checklist recognize database support with MariaDB in CentOS 7.2?

Everything seems set for installing Joomla in my droplet. I started following the excellent Community tutorial on using Joomla in a CentOS 6 droplet, but I chose to use CentOS 7 instead. The major difference between the two versions during the LAMP configuration process is that CentOS 7’s repositories no longer provide automatic support for MySQL.

At that point in the LAMP setup, I decided just to use MariaDB, since I read that it’s a direct replacement. I package name is mariadb-server, and I think I’m supposed to use the commands systemctl start mariadb and systemctl stop mariadb to start and stop it.

I went through all the database setup steps from our CentOS 6 tutorial, as if I were using MySQL. Everything seems to work the same. One thing I did differently is that I did not use “joomla” as the name as the database, thinking that it would be a security concern. Could that be the whole problem?

I kind of doubt it, but I’m not sure exactly what I did wrong with the database setup, or if the problem is that I have to do something special to get MariaDB to be recognized. I’m certainly willing to use MySQL instead of MariaDB, but I’m hesitant to try installing it outside of the normal repositories, because then I’ll have service conflicts with all the MariaDB dependencies, and I don’t know how to uninstall and untangle everything.