change default mysql storage engine on Ubuntu

I've installed mysql 5.1.49 on Ubuntu. I've added the following line to the end of /etc/mysql/my.cnf

default-storage-engine=innodb

I've restarted the mysqld process, then run

mysql> show engines;
+------------+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+------+------------+
| Engine     | Support | Comment                                                        | Transactions | XA   | Savepoints |
+------------+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+------+------------+
| InnoDB     | YES     | Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys     | YES          | YES  | YES        |
| MRG_MYISAM | YES     | Collection of identical MyISAM tables                          | NO           | NO   | NO         |
| BLACKHOLE  | YES     | /dev/null storage engine (anything you write to it disappears) | NO           | NO   | NO         |
| CSV        | YES     | CSV storage engine                                             | NO           | NO   | NO         |
| MEMORY     | YES     | Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary ta开发者_StackOverflow社区bles      | NO           | NO   | NO         |
| FEDERATED  | NO      | Federated MySQL storage engine                                 | NULL         | NULL | NULL       |
| ARCHIVE    | YES     | Archive storage engine                                         | NO           | NO   | NO         |
| MyISAM     | DEFAULT | Default engine as of MySQL 3.23 with great performance         | NO           | NO   | NO         |
+------------+---------+----------------------------------------------------------------+--------------+------+------------+

As you can see MyISAM is still the default, what am I missing? I've also run

sudo find / -name 'my.cnf'

to verify that there is no other my.cnf file present on the system

It's probably in the wrong section of the my.cnf file.

You need to set that variable in the [mysqld] section. If you put it at the end of the config file, it's probably in a different section, since [mysqld] is typically the first section, not the last.

Verify that you have put default-storage-engine=innodb in the appropriate [group], usually [mysqld].