A massive problem I've ran in to, and I think it's because Znote's mysql commands are out of date, is when I get the schema (after getting the stock database connection failure) there are outdated commands. The main one being "DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8". I found and deleted all instances of "DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8" and "DEFAULT CHARSET=latin" from the schema that Znote's install process provides.
I'm running it on Linux 14.04, though I don't think that's the cause of the problem.
Please let me know if this is in any way confusing.
/helium101