Comment 18 for bug 566710

(You haven't included your email address in either of those complaints, nor have you published your email address at your Launchpad page, which makes it rather hard to reply directly to you. The bug tracker is not a forum for people to simply "post instructions" for straightforward [and easily google-able] instructions. However...)

As @mariuz indicated in #16, there is a patched version of this package available for the *next* version of Ubuntu ("Maverick", AKA version 10.10 [I think]).
However, looking at the Launchpad page (http://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firebird2.1) we can see that the patch has been made available for other versions as well.

In either of the following cases, note that if you've reported this bug, chances are Firebird is already installed on your system - although likely not configured correctly. You may first want to *uninstall* these packages before attempting to reinstall them.

The automatic way:
go to "Software Sources" under the Administration menu in the GUI and enable the "Universe" repository. It's just a checkbox, you do not need to add any URLs to anything. (In fact, I recommend you undo whatever changes you were talking about, above.) If you can't figure this out, try googling "ubuntu how to enable the universe repository" - the top 10 hits are all reasonably clear; the instructions for v9.x should also work on v10.x. Then launch Synaptic, remove the offending firebird package(s) from your system (I would suggest right-clicking and choosing the "Completely Remove..." option if you're not sure how.), APPLY those changes, then re-install the firebird package(s).

The manual way:
Start at this page: https://launchpad.net/firebird/2.1, and click on the version of Ubuntu that corresponds to whatever you're running. (10.04 is "Lucid Lynx") From the resultant page, under "Builds:" (right-hand column) click on the architecture you are running (most likely amd64 or i386, depending on whether you installed a 64-bit or 32-bit OS). Then click on the name of the package you want to download. From *that* page, under "Downloadable files", click on the .deb file and download it. You'll probably have to download them all or you'll run into dependency problems.