Firebird SQL Client Library install on CentOS 5 in 2014

August 2014

This is how I was able to install version 2.1 of the 32bit Firebird client library (libfbclient.so) on a 32bit CentOS 5 server.

NB: if you are not running as root, you will need to add 'sudo' before most of these commands.

First, this is where you can check for the latest available Firebird installers for CentOS 5 Letter F Group. This is in EPEL 5 not 6.

I had to add details about this EPEL repo. First I checked whether I already had any configuration for EPEl 5...

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# ls

I did not. I used vi to create the repo file:

 # vi /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

The contents of my epel.repo WORK but they give an alert during installation because the GPGKEY is not a match. Here are the contents:

[EPEL32]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 32bit
baseurl=http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/
gpgkey=http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-5

So that lets CentOS know about a new place to use when trying to install with yum. With that in place, the actual yum install is very easy. Use "firebird-libfbclient" when all you want are the Firebird client library files. For other Firebird installation choices on CentOS 5, see that Letter F Group link above.

 # yum install firebird-libfbclient

Aside from asking you to confirm the GPGKEY discrepancy, that should install immediately. I ended up with the v2.1 Firebird client library files. Confirm it like this:

# ls /usr/lib/libfb*

When you list out the Firebird client library files, you should see 2 files in /usr/lib for a 32bit installation.

If you want to make use of the shared object (Linux "DLL") with a program compiled with FreePascal, you have to add a symbolic link. ( Reference )

# ln /usr/lib/libfbclient.so.2 /usr/lib/libfbclient.so

Now this is a bit off-topic but if you want to get some files off an Amazon S3 bucket to complete your custom installation in any way, consider using the s3cmd tool to sync files from (part of) a bucket to your Linux machine.

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d
# wget http://s3tools.org/repo/RHEL_5/s3tools.repo
# yum install s3cmd

Have a great day.