Install Firebird 2.5 onto Ubuntu 10.04 via PPA

As of Ubuntu 12.04 Firebird 2.5 packages are included in the official repositories, but here I am focusing on installing Firebird 2.5 on older installations with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. So you want to install Firebird 2.5 onto Ubuntu 10.04 without the need to install everything by hand, you can go ahead and use a ppa which has Firebird 2.5 packages. But there seems to be a problem with the gpg keys so a simple sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mapopa like it is stated on the official Ubuntu Documentation doesn't work. So here is what did the trick for me.

Mariuz's PPA

First we'll have to import the key from Mariuz's PPA by hand.

sudo gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 0BE6D09EEF648708

Once we did that add the next two values to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mapopa/ppa/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mapopa/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

After that you're done .. do a apt-get update and a apt-cache search firebird and you should see the following packages in your results.

firebird2.5-classic - Firebird Classic Server - an RDBMS based on InterBase 6.0 code
firebird2.5-classic-common - common files for firebird 2.5 "classic" and "superclassic" servers
firebird2.5-classic-dbg - collected debug symbols for firebird2.5-classic and -superclassic
firebird2.5-common - common files for firebird 2.5 servers and clients
firebird2.5-server-common - common files for firebird 2.5 servers
firebird2.5-super - Firebird Super Server - an RDBMS based on InterBase 6.0 code
firebird2.5-super-dbg - collected debug symbols for firebird2.5-super
firebird2.5-superclassic - Firebird SupecClassic Server - an RDBMS based on InterBase 6.0 code