--- bodhitree2 wrote:

> Thus I'm officially giving up.

Please don't give up that easily. I am almost certain that the problem
is the fact that directory is within your home directory. Try to do
the following:

- create a directory in root of your filesystem hierarchy, something
like /databases
- set owner and group to firebird
- set 770 or 777 privileges
- try to create the database using localhost:/databases/ prefix

milanb@milanws:~$ ls -ld /databases
drwxrwx--- 6 firebird firebird 1512 2007-07-06 15:56 /databases/


If this doesn't help either, please let us know. There are ways to
find out what is actually failing by using tools like strace.

</M>