I'm having a hard time getting PHPBB installed on Centos. We get the error that The PHP configuration on your server doesn't support the database type that you chose. We choose MySQL 3.x but get that error. Perhaps PHP4 isn't compatible with MySQL 3.23.58-1?
I think it's not a problem of compatibility PHP4 with MySQL 3.x
Few weeks ago I had a problem to access PostgreSQL database from the PHP on CentOS 4. I changed database username to the name httpd use to work in system - just "apache". After that I could run my PHP scripts.
And leave MySQL from CentOS distro.