2
At the risk of getting into an infinite loop
... Are you saying that you now have a dedicated server and are trying to install MySQL itself? That is beyond the scope of Xoops. XOOPS is an application that *uses* MySQL.
I'll give you a nudge in the right direction. my-small.cnf is a sample file of the my.cnf that is the initial (optional) startup config for the mysqld server. Nothing to do with compiling mysql. Compiling MySQL is a large process and unless you have all the bits and know the options you won't do better than the defaults or just using a binary.
I think you had performance issues before? Sure, it would be optimal to compile the kernel, Apache, MySQL, PHP, openssl, ldap, gd, et al yourself but you might be over your head right now or make choices that are less efficient than binaries.
You should have someone very proficient to get it started. You might start with a binary install of MySQL and try to compile Apache and PHP. Use an accelerator like mmcache (plays nicely with the smarty engine) and go from there. Get it running the easy way and then work on the source.
A little hint, keep the binary installs for emergency and as you can, install compiled versions in different locations (/usr/local & /usr). Have identical httpd.conf (Apache) , my.cnf (mysql), & php.ini (PHP) configs and you can flip between them and in different combinations.