suphp Issues

I am migrating servers and dragging a few customers with older versions of OSCommerce with me. TO do that I have to have register_globals On for them....not possible with the servers install of PHP-5.4. I am trying to get suphp installed and I'm running into a brick wall. I have two Joomla installs that I'm testing with 5.3. I can test that it is in fact working by putting a php file that spits back out info and it does say PHP-5.3.16. However, when I try to connect to a Joomla site I'm always getting

Database Error: Unable to connect to the database:Could not connect to MySQL

So suphp is in fact working...but for some reason mysql isn't working with it. I compiled PHP-5.3.16 with the below...any suggestions?

./configure --build=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --prefix=/opt/php53 --with-libdir=lib64 --with-config-file-path=/opt/php53/lib --with-config-file-scan-dir=/opt/php53/lib/php.ini.d --disable-debug --with-pic --disable-rpath --without-pear --with-bz2 --with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr --with-xpm-dir=/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-t1lib=/usr --without-gdbm --with-gettext --with-gmp --with-iconv --with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-openssl --with-pcre-regex --with-zlib --with-layout=GNU --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --with-kerberos --enable-shmop --enable-calendar --with-libxml-dir=/usr --enable-xml --with-system-tzdata --with-mhash --enable-pcntl --with-imap --with-imap-ssl --enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --with-gd --enable-bcmath --enable-dba --with-gdbm=/usr --with-tcadb=/usr --with-xmlrpc --with-ldap --with-ldap-sasl --enable-mysqlnd --with-mysql=/usr --with-mysqli=mysqlnd --with-mysql-sock=/var/lib64/mysql/mysql.sock --enable-dom --with-pgsql --enable-wddx --with-snmp --enable-soap --with-xsl --enable-xmlreader --enable-xmlwriter --with-curl --enable-pdo --with-pdo-odbc=unixODBC,/usr --with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd --with-pdo-pgsql --with-pdo-sqlite --with-sqlite3 --enable-json --enable-zip --without-readline --with-libedit --with-pspell --enable-phar --with-mcrypt --with-tidy --enable-sysvmsg --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvsem --enable-posix --with-unixODBC=/usr --enable-fileinfo --enable-intl --with-icu-dir=/usr --with-enchant