Compiling PHP

I'm trying to compile PHP (trying both 5.0.0 and 4.3.8) on Suse 9.1 Professional. The configure script by default looks in /param/lib (the /lib is hard-coded into the script), and so there is no way to tell it to look in /param/lib64 instead. I've tried writing a perl script to modify configure, and I've also tried copying libraries and header files to /opt/tmp/lib and using /opt/tmp as the param instead of /usr. Neither really seem to be working though. Is there any easier way to change where configure is looking for the libs? Thanks, Adam