This is a comparison, not an advertisement!
All of the steps that you've taken to this point are the pain points that Zend Core for IBM is trying to address:
- Easy to install and configure precompiled binaries for Linux (x86, x86-64, POWER) and AIX including:
- Cloudscape
- PHP 5
- DB2 Runtime Client
- Documentation
- Configuration interface
The major technical difference is that the PHP database extension is the ibm_db2 driver, instead of PDO.
Apart from ease of use, you also get a free support incident from Zend -- and support for Cloudscape is available from IBM.
But it's lots more fun doing it yourself :)
Zend Core for IBM: http://zend.com/core/ibm/