PHP building on Linux: A question on configure script!

Hi, I am involved in porting PHP for NetWare. We are now looking at and trying to understand how PHP is built on Linux. I have a question for the same. It could be a newbie question on configure script since we are new to Linux. Please help. The question is like this: On NetWare: We generate mod_php executable as the Apache module which Apache loads when appropriately configured. This in turn will use the phplib executable which has the TSRM, ZEND, all the standard extensions and libraries built into it. Then we have separate executables for extensions like MySQL, LDAP, XML etc. On Linux: We are trying to look at building a similar binaries on Linux also. Is that how it is done on Linux also? To build for Apache on Unix, it appears that we have to use the following options in the configure script to get the equivalent of what I mentioned above: --with-apache=<Path to Apache source> --disable-posix --with-mysql=shared --with-ldap=shared --enable-ftp --enable-bcmath --enable-calendar The problem in this approach is that we seem to be getting a static library (xxx.a) as an output. We are not clear what we are supposed to do with this library! Perhaps this needs to be then built along with Apache into the Apache executable. There is an option called: --with-apxs=<path to the apxs script of Apache> which seems to produce a "DSO" which doesn't seem to work on Linux. The build fails due to errors in the apxs script. So, isn't it possible to produce on Linux, the equivalent of what I mentioned above for NetWare? If so, what options do we need to use for the configure process? We need to understand whether we are not using the right options or whether it is simply not possible to do so with what we have. The latter meaning that we need to make the necessary modifications to the input files to get what we want. Your early reply on this is highly appreciated. Thanks, Ananth.