Hello

I was following this tutorial:

http://www.ioncube.com/loader_installation.php

When i tried to restart Apache, it got stuck for like a minute and then it told me:

"The apache2 instance did not start within 20 seconds. Please read the log fil es to discover problems".

The log is telling me this:

"PHP Fatal error: [ionCube Loader] The Loader must appear as the first entry in the php.ini file in Unknown on line 0
Failed loading /usr/local/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.5.so: /usr/local/ioncube /ioncube_loader_lin_5.5.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32"

Now i deleted the ioncube related lines and Apache still doesn't start.

What do i do?

This is probably the file that the error was referring to.
I'm on a Slackware Current machine, so your path may vary. The easiest way to find it is to just "#find / -iname php.ini" from the command line as root or a root-like user.
Line 0 is pretty straight forward, it should just say
Open the file up and take a look at what happened when you installed ionCube. If it's completely torn up, do an internet search for "php.ini" and just replace the file.

I looked for a php.ini file on google, downloaded it an replaced it.

Now Apache starts but...

"Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress."

PROGRESS~!!!!

You have a wordpress install on this thing?
There is a line in your php.ini that initiates the MySQL extension, look through the file and un-comment it. If you saved the old file (and I hope you did) you can find it by doing a search on "MySQL" in the php.ini.

instead of modifying the php.ini directly, you might want to look to see if there is a directory /etc/php5/mods-available
if so

put the line
in a file /etc/php5/mods-available/ioncube.ini

as for the error you are getting
this means you are using a version of ioncube for the wrong architecture (i386) vs what your php is compiled for
to find this
post the output of 'uname -m'