After reading the latest comments from the Gentoo Firebird
maintainer (Gentoo Bug 207932,
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207932) I think perhaps I
should describe the situation as I see it at the moment:

- Firebird 2.0.3 on Gentoo starts with a noticeable delay and the
wrong message
"Starting Firebird server ...
check /var/log/firebird/firebird.log file for errors
can not start server [ ok ] "
Wrong, because in fact the server runs at this point.

- Firebird 2.0.3 on Ubuntu 7.10, using the Ubuntu packages, runs
without error messages at startup. I have used the workaround from
this launchpad comment:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firebird/+bug/135582/comments/6
It's possible that that wasn't even necessary, because I always get
the message "Directory '/var/run/firebird/2.0' already exists".

- In both distributions the Firebird log contains the message pair
"Elend (Client) Mon Feb 11 14:26:26 2008
INET/inet_error: connect errno = 111
Elend (Client) Mon Feb 11 14:26:26 2008
/usr/lib/firebird/../../../usr/bin/fbguard: guardian
starting ../../../usr/bin/fbserver"
at every start. The wording of the second message is from Gentoo,
the content is the same for both. Ubuntu just doesn't tell the user
about the inet_error, while Gentoo does (in this special case I
prefer silence...). And I think the delay isn't so noticeable in
Ubuntu. But I use Ubuntu on my slow machine, so that may be an
illusion.

- More initial confusion in both distributions, because they both
seem to need the SYSDBA password in the security database _and_ in a
textfile (readable by root only, but still, why?). And
the "dpkg-reconfigure" in Ubuntu which should change it at both
places doesn't work. It's quite possible though that I just don't
know enough to change this.

No other problems with Firebird at this point. Thanks for all advice
and support!

Herta