cacti on a freepbx distro

[neuronetv]

has anyone ever succeeded in getting cacti to work on a freepbx distro? I need a phone system so I'm running freepbx-6.0 which is based on centos 6, 64bit and I'm having great difficulty getting cacti to work. Freepbx comes with mysql-5.1.73 already installed and the latest cacti version from yum is 0.8.8b. I always get this error:

FATAL: Cannot connect to MySQL server on 'localhost'. Please make sure you have specified a valid MySQL database name in 'include/config.php'

after trawling google for ages nothing worked so I'm wondering if it's actually possible for cacti and freepbx to live side by side? If not then I'll stop wasting my time. Repeated efforts to get past this error ended up in freepbx getting hosed as well so I had to reinstall from scratch.