I installed the free edition of Zend core for the php engine with oci extensions. The install went without mishap and it is installed without apache as we are not doing more with this than running php scripts that will connect to a remote server. Every time I call php such as in the following example, this is what happens: martin@tctestlog:~$ php --interactive Interactive mode enabled At this point, I have nothing further to do so I send a CTRL-D to exit. Segmentation fault Let's try a script: martin@tctestlog:~$ php -f oscript Segmentation fault The sqlnet.ora and tnsnames.ora files are being found according to the output from strace -e trace=file. This is in accordance with the environment variables I have been setting so this part appears to be working: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/Zend/Core/lib export ORACLE_SID='orcl' export ORACLE_HOME='/usr/local/etc/oracle' Any ideas as to why something is still unhappy? This is an edition of ubuntu that is rather new if that rings any bells. It is amazing just how difficult it has been to get this one little project off the ground. Thanks for any good ideas. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK Systems Engineer OSU Information Technology Department Telecommunications Services Group -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l