just a quick update, and more for anybody else that may have had the same problems i did. I did a clean install of suse10 (the old windows in me) following a portion of perfect setup for suse10, mostly for the os itself and proftpd.
as for apache2, mysql, php5, and phpmyadmin. All were compiled from source, and after a bit of configuration, it all worked.......woot !!
dont mean to step on anyones toes, but here is the tut i followed:
http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-install-mysql