For historical reasons I run a Fedora core 4. It turns out that php5 is configured NOT to use mysql in this default install. Which is stupid, but what can you do?
Well, for starters you could follow: helpful howto.
The php source Version that it uses is 5.1.2. And it turns out that this is needed: Trying the current 5.2.1 resulted in
configure: error: The PCRE extension requires PCRE library version >= 6.6
In other words php 5.2.1 insists on having perl compatible regular expressions with a version number higher than 6.6. We ignore the fact that Perl Regular Expressions probably have not changed in the last ten years. So I am not sure why, -o- why, php 5.2 should now be insisting on a new Version.
Over at Centos there is a how to to get pcre 6.6 installed. Only problem is, that it does not fly on fedora core 4. To new for it I suppose.
So in the end I got php 5.1.2 from here and the beforementioned how to worked like a charm. Here my mirror of that specific php Version.