And you have MySQL and MySQL-client RPMs installed? And the MySQL server is up and running? And you have php and php-common RPMs installed?
I don't have Mandrake 9.0, this stuff just works when installed on Red Hat. I haven't found anything on the web to indicate it should be any harder than this on Mandrake. Sorry if I haven't been much help.
P.S. You never would want to use "root" and root's real Linux password in a PHP script.
P.S.S. I notice Mandrake breaks out Apache into more RPMS. I don't know if these are needed but other RPMs you might want to make sure are installed are:
apache-common
apache-conf
apache-modules
[ December 19, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]