OK, well here's the rub. Having spent weeks getting DBD:InterBase working, it's absolutely horrible with 2.1. Acording to the doc, it's been tested with 1.5, so although it works after a fashion, it mangles dates, truncates fields and crashes doing a while/fetch. So, very disapointing. However, ODBC has mysteriously sprung into life, maybe it was the transition to Kubuntu 9.10, which seems more stable, for firebird at least. Anyway here are the ODBC instructions, which I found somewhere, I'd like to give credit, but sadly I can't remember:

Installing the Firebird Database ODBC Driver

The Firebird ODBC driver is not in the Ubuntu repositories so it has to be downloaded from the FirebirdSQL site: http://www.firebirdsql.org/download/prerelease/odbc/OdbcFb-LIB-RC1-2.0.0148.i686.tar.gz

It contains a single file named "libOdbcFb.so". Copy this file to the /usr/lib directory.

Next make sure you have the Firebird client library installed: apt-get install libfbclient2

Openoffice and probably a few other programs will insist on using a driver named libgds.so for connecting to a Firebird database. A symbolic link will have to be created:

nb: I didn't do this ln -s /usr/lib/libfbclient.so.2 /usr/lib/libgds.so At this point you are ready to add some entries to the odbc config files. If they don't already exist you can create them.

Here's another example odbc.ini:

[DBNAME]
Description = Firebird
Driver = Firebird
Dbname = localhost:/var/lib/firebird/2.1/data/employee.fdb
User = SYSDBA
Password = xxxxx
Role =
CharacterSet =
ReadOnly = No
NoWait = No
[download]

And the relevant entries for the odbcinst.ini file:

[Firebird]
Description = InterBase/Firebird ODBC Driver
Driver = /usr/lib/libOdbcFb.so
Setup = /usr/lib/libOdbcFbS.so
Threading = 1
FileUsage = 1
CPTimeout =
CPReuse =
[download]

You should now be able to connect to DBNAME from OpenOffice or other programs using the ODBC connection method.

Regards

Steve