Firebird 2.5 on Ubuntu 20.04


I recently upgraded Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04, and Firebird (version 2.5) was left behind in the upgrade. Yes, I know I should also upgrade Firebird, to 3 or even 4. But need to get existing working first Here’s what I did to restore.

Go to www.ibphoenix.com and download file “FirebirdSS-2.5.9.27139-0.amd64.tar.gz”

Decompress this file – I used Engrampa for this, and the contents ended up in folder “/home/FirebirdSS-2.5.9.27139-0.amd64/”

I was able to skip these last 2 steps because this folder had survived from Ubuntu 18.04.

In Thunar File Manager right-click on this folder and click on “Open terminal here”. Then

$ sudo apt-get install libncurses.so.5
$ sudo ./install.sh
$ sudo ln -s /opt/firebird/lib/libfbclient.so.2.5.9 /usr/lib/libfbclient.so.2.5.1

The first step above installs a library needed by the Firebird install which was missing.
The 2nd step above runs the Firebird installer.
The 3rd step above creates a symbolic link from the 2nd filename (which does not exist) to the first (which does). I use Lazarus for application development, and Lazarus seeks the wrong version (2.5.1) of the Firebird Client library in the wrong location (/usr/lib/). Aaagh. It's a shame that this Laz error seems to be baked into the executables which I build, requiring you the end-user to take this step to rectify. Apologies.