This info is based an email kindly submitted to Firebird
groups by Julio Carlos Canaviri C. I don't claim any
credits but I thought that it might be useul to people
lookig for tips. My mdofications of Julio's instructions
consist of changing paths to reflect directory structure
under Mandrake 10.

These are steps to make PHP under Mandrake 10 aware of
Firebird 1.03.
My test machine is an i586 so I can't test for Firebird 1.5

1.- Install Mandrake 10 with Apache 2 and PHP included on
the installation disks.

2.- After the installtion completes install Firebird as
root
# rpm -Uvh FirebirdSS-1.0.3.972-0.i386.rpm

3.- Download the source code of PHP (php-4.3.5.tar.bz2)

4.- Extract the source code to any directory. For example
/home/someuser

5.- Go to the above diectory
# cd /home/someuser/php-4.3.5

6.- Compile PHP for interbase/firebird support
# ./configure --with-interbase=shared,/opt/interbase
# make

This steps generates the interbase.so library in
/home/someuser/php-4.3.5/modules

7.- Copy the interbase.so to /usr/lib/php4
# cp modules/interbase.so /usr/lib/php4

8.- Go to /etc/php and create the file interbase.ini
# cd /etc/php
# touch interbase.ini

9.- Add this line to interbase.ini:
extension=interbase.so

10.- Start or (Restart - if it running) Apache Server

# service httpd start
or
# service httpd restart

11.- To test use the following script:

<?
$coonection =
ibase_connect("localhost:/opt/interbase/examples/employee.gdb",\
"sysdba","masterkey"); //this in one line
$sql = "select * from customer";
$res = ibase_query($sql);
while ($row = ibase_fetch_row($res)) {
echo $row[0].' '.$row[1].'<br />';
}
?>

12.- Save the script in /var/www/html as fbtest.php

13.- Run the script in the web navigator by navigating to:
http://yourmandrakeserver.xxx/test.php

NOTES:
Steps 3, 4, 5 an 6 could be replaced with just one step
("download interbase.so from..." ). Perhaps IBPhoenix or
FirebirdSQL would agree to place the file (interbase.so -
about 128KB) in the download area? Or maybe there is even
someone who could produce and rpm to set up FB for PHP. I
saw a rpm like that for RH 7.x but making one myself is way
above my head at this point.






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