"Can't initialize character set utf-8 (path: /usr/share...)"

I'm new to hosting web-sites on Linux (Ubuntu 12.04). I decided to give it a go for a learning experience.

I've already learned a lot and have most of it setup, but I'm lost on this error "Can't initialize character set utf-8 (path: /usr/share/mysql/charsets/)"

My site used to be hosted using XAMPP on Windows and it worked fine.

I'm not even sure what the error means and none of my site code has changed.

I modified my MySQL my.cfg and added the following:

[mysqld] 
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci' 
init_connect='SET NAMES utf8' 
character-set-server=utf8 
collation-server=utf8_unicode_ci 
skip-character-set-client-handshake

I've also confirmed the results using mysql->show variables like '%char%';

+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+

However I'm still getting that error. Any ideas? Help appreciated, thanks :)