There have been several other posts about this, but none of the answers seemed to work for me.
When I navigate to the CakePHP page on my local machine, there is one
I tried splicing the code from Example 2 of http://php.net/manual/en/pdo.connections.php into /app/View/Pages/home.ctp. I had to fix the arguments the PDO constructor and change the name of the table in the query. The example 2 code returned the error "Error!: could not find driver". Based on King Jk's answer I was attempting to modify the php.ini when I started to wonder where a php_pdo_mysql.so might live. http://php.net/pdo_mysql showed how it was compiled as part of PHP via the --with-pdo-mysql option to configure. Recompiling fixed my problem. Note I'm working on a Ubuntu 12.10 system with PHP 5.5.9 and Apache Webserver 2.4.6