phpmyadmin connection problem

[sks1024]

I am getting this error

#2002 - Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (13)

when i try to conenct to mysql server with the hostname in config.inc.php set to host= localhost when I set it to host= localhost.localdomain I can conenct fine. Can someone steer me in the right direction. My hosts file has this

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

Thanks,
Stan