Slackware :: Slack Full Install - Joomla Says No Mysql Support

I made a full install of Slackware and have been using one of my boxes as an Apache web server. I recently tried to install Joomla, the PHP CMS software, and when I ran the pre-install requisite checker (The second step of the installation), the installer notified me that I do not have MySQL support. I find this especially strange as I've made webpages using PHP that made use of MySQL databases.

My pre-post research has lead me to several other people with the same problem. Half were using windows, and just had not uncommented the "extension mysql.so" line in the php.ini file. The other half solved their problem by installing their distro's php-mysql module. According to what I'd read, you can still use MySQL if you don't have that module installed, but Joomla does need it to be able to use the MySQL database.

I've searched long and hard for this plugin/add-on/module for Slackware, but to no avail. It's available in RPM format, and I know that it's possible to use rpm2tgz to convert these files, but I don't know exactly what the issue is, and if Slackware may be different. I don't want to install that and then find out that it overwrote something that I'd needed.