At 03:11 AM 5/01/2007, you wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I am trying to get Firebird (classic 1.5x) working on the above.
>Installing succeeded using apt-get etc. The only problem is: it
>doesn't work. All I get when trying to connect to the server (from a
>remote client) is: 'cannot attach to password database'.
>Also, when I do GSEC on the server itself, it tells me a little more:
>Operating directive open failed
>No such file or directory
>unable to open database
>
>Now it seems to me there are some post-install instructions that have
>to be executed before use, but can anybody tell me what or where they are?

Yes, there are post-install scripts to run after dezipping the
tarball kit. They are documented in the Firebird 1.5.3 and 1.5.4
release notes, in the installation section.

However, Ubuntu is subject to Debian rules, so the supplied scripts
won't do the proper thing under these rules. Debian does its own
thing with Firebird, beyond the purview of the Firebird project,
which makes troubleshooting land somewhere between a rock and a hard
place. I gave up trying to install Firebird on Ubuntu (or, rather, I
put it on the "to do" list) because I found it required a lot of
knowledge about how and where Debian looks for things that I didn't
have time to research and test.

However, I'm not recommending that *you* give up. The Debian
community has a specialised mailing list for firebird 1.5 packaging
(look for "pkg-firebird-general" in Google; it is not one of our
lists) and downloads seem to be freely available. Confusingly, they
seem to be using the string "firebird2-" as a prefix to their
Firebird 1.5.x packages. (As I already mentioned, they don't subject
themselves to our conventions...)

You might also like to post a message in firebird-devel. Damyan
Ivanov, who frequents firebird-devel, also seems to frequent the
Debian list. Another possible source of help could be the
firebird-php list, because the list history shows that at least one
member of that list is running Firebird 1.5.x on Ubuntu...

I've also seen - live and kicking - a working installation of
Firebird Classic 1.5.3 on Ubuntu in a VMWare server hosted on a WinXP
laptop via a hot-pluggable external USB drive...so, even the abstruse
is possible....

Have you tried Googling for "ubuntu", "debian" and "firebird 1.5"?

./heLen