I installed slackware 11 on a dedicated machine striclty to dish out web pages
I did not install mysql server because I do not want this service on this box.
However though I now get the infamous

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: mysql_connect()

Since I "thought" i had a good grasp on these simple issues I made sure it is loading the mysql.so extenstion in php.ini which of course it is

In fact everything with the ini and httpd.conf are identical to another server running the only difference is that one has mysql on board and it is working fine.

So what I want to know or do is find out if there is a way to properly load what ever it needs to use the mysql functions in PHP without installing mysql server. I really didnt think it would be such a pita but as usuall im wrong.

Any help from anyone that has done it before will be appreciate otherwise i suppose i will just install the mysql server and be done with it...

As far as I know (which may not be very far ) the only way around that fatal arror is to have a MySQL server reply to the mysql_connect() call. I've never implemented another means of having MySQL function calls actually 'work' without MysQL installed.
I wouldn't put it past some very creative scripting though, for there to be a way around it. Php is a pretty powerful language. Perhaps in the Apache httpd.conf (or *maybe* php.ini) you could arrange to pre-empt or redirect the mysql call(s) to another page with a little script which simply returns 'TRUE' or whatever value/return-code would be returned by the mysql_connect() function?
I/we did this to implement part of a firewall on a Debian server a while back using Apache's php-prepend functionality. You might have the mysql_connect function call all alone on a page by itself, which when called would actually get prepended by apache and replaced by the script which would return the phony 'TRUE' (or error=0)
Of course, the php may be 'too smart to fool' so easily :P