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Installing Firebird 3.0 and 4.0 on Linux

In this article we describe installation of Firebird version 3 and 4 on the popular Linux versions: CentOS 7, Oracle Linux 7/8, Debian 9/10, Ubuntu18/20 and OpenSUSE15.0.

In order to get Firebird distribution for Linux, please use tar archive from the official Firebird web site:

  • Firebird 4: https://firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-4-0/
  • Firebird 3: https://firebirdsql.org/en/firebird-3-0/

We assume that installation is done either with root or with sudoer, and that Linux computer has Internet access.

Please note that some commands require input from the user.

Also, we recommend reading of Release Notes for the version of Firebird which you intend to install.

Prerequisites

System libraries requirements for 4.0.1 and 3.0 became the same: static linking for ncurses5 and tommath0 and dynamic for ICU.

Depending on the distribution, ncurses5 will be system library (RH7/Debian) or available as a package for backward compatibility (RH8/Debian).

Library tommath will be with version 0 or version 1 (they are binary compatible). If there is no tommath0, we will create symlink.

Other necessary system tools are tar and curl.

We install these packages explicitly so package manager will mark them as manually controlled and did not uninstall them automatically.