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Installing the Driver on Windows

If you are doing a first-time install of the driver, or if you have uninstalled an older version, it is recommended that you use the executable installer.These instructions will assume that you are installing the 32-bit driver, but the procedure is the same for installing the 64-bit one.Under the hood, the 32-bit driver library will be installed into \windows\sysWOW64 on a 64-bit Windows.Any other install will place the driver in windows\system32.

Download or move the executable installer kit to the desktop.Right-click on it and select menu:Run as Administrator[].

fb odbc installer on desktop
Figure 1. ODBC driver installer on the desktop

Click your way through the screens until you reach the one in which you configure your preferences for the installation:

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Figure 2. ODBC driver installer screens

If you want or need to, you can have the driver installed in some other location than the one offered by the installer as the default.Use the btn:[Browse] button to find the location where you want to have the driver installed.

Note

The installer will create the \Firebird_ODBC subfolder if it does not exist already.

Lastly, the installer will display the configuration you have chosen.If you happy with it, just click btn:[Install] and it is done.

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Figure 3. ODBC driver installer final screen
Note

You might observe here that, on our system, we keep our own dedicated “Programs64” and “Programs32” folders under C:\Windows.That is simply preference as to how we organise our server and monitor the volume of stuff installed by Windows updates into its own program folders.

The .chm and .html documents noted on that screen are older evolutions of this document that are still built in with the kits at the point of this writing.

Installing the Driver on Linux

Pavel Cisar

There are two prerequisites for installing the ODBC/JDBC driver on Linux:

  • The “unixODBC” package must be installed

  • Firebird must be installed, initially at least, for testing the installation

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Unpacking the Files

The ODBC/JDBC driver packages for Linux are gzipped tar files.After gunzip they should be processed by tar, or you can rename them to .tar.gz and use a tool such as Midnight Commander to unpack them.

Building from Sources

Building from source code (recommended), requires the development package for unixODBC.Proceed with the following steps:

  1. Download and unpack the Firebird driver sources

  2. Rename makefile.linux in .source/Builds/Gcc.lin to makefile

  3. Set the evironment variables FBINCDIR (Firebird include directory) and FBLIBDIR (Firebird lib directory) if necessary.

  4. Run make which will create the library libOdbcFb.so in a subdirectory

  5. It is possible to copy the library to /usr/local/lib64 or any preferred directory;or run make install to symlink the library from the unixODBC directory

Installing the Binary Package

To install from the binary package, copy libOdbcFb.so to /usr/local/lib64, /usr/local/lib32 or any other desired destination directory, as appropriate.