Hi there

> 2. Suppose I wanted to use a Linux Server exclusively for FB.
> What is necessary. My friend kept asking do you need this,
> do you need that and I said I dont know. Obviously all the
> KDE, Gnome stuff can be avoided. (I did avoid it. It was
> an old machine with 32 MB ram so it is command line only.)

Looking at FirebirdCS-1.5.0.3773-RC5 installed on our RedHat 9.0 box here,
you need the following packages install for it to work:

* bash
* glibc
* xinetd

This means (from what I can tell) that your absolute minimum system will
have the following packages installed. It could be quite hard to work on a
system with just these packages - but Firebird should run on a system with
just the following:

* basesystem
* bash
* bzip2-libs
* chkconfig
* coreutils
* cracklib
* cracklib-dicts
* db4
* dev
* e2fsprogs
* elfutils-libelf
* expat
* filesystem
* fileutils
* findutils
* gawk
* gdbm
* gettext
* glib
* glibc
* glibc-common
* gmp
* grep
* groff
* info
* initscripts
* iproute
* iputils
* krb5-libs
* less
* libgcc
* libgcj
* libstdc++
* libtermcap
* libtermcap-devel
* man
* mingetty
* mktemp
* modutils
* mount
* ncurses
* net-tools
* openssl
* pam
* pcre
* popt
* procps
* psmisc
* python
* readline
* redhat-release
* rpm
* sed
* setup
* shadow-utils
* sysklogd
* SysVinit
* tcp_wrappers
* termcap
* texinfo
* util-linux
* which
* words
* xinetd
* zip
* zlib

G