I am using CentOS release 5; to find what version you are using, enter cat /etc/redhat-release
at a bash prompt. That is not to say that these steps won’t work for other linux distros, I just haven’t tried them. Anyway, when I first tried to install memcached I could not create the Makefile due to a dependence on libevent. So first, from /usr/local/src:

curl -O http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.3e.tar.gz
tar xzvf libevent-1.3e.tar.gz
cd libevent-1.3e
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

curl -O http://monkey.org/~provos/libevent-1.3e.tar.gz
tar xzvf libevent-1.3e.tar.gz
cd libevent-1.3e
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make installHopefully everything went smoothly for you there. Now on to getting memcached, again from /usr/local/src:

curl -O http://www.danga.com/memcached/dist/...d-1.2.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
LDFLAGS='-Wl,--rpath /usr/local/lib' ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

curl -O http://www.danga.com/memcached/dist/...d-1.2.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
cd memcached-1.2.2.tar.gz
LDFLAGS='-Wl,--rpath /usr/local/lib' ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make installNow:

No errors, let’s make sure it’s running:

Awesome! Hey, that’s the name of the blog, how unoriginal.

Now to stop it:

I hope that saved you some time.

For those curious as to what that LDFLAGS='-Wl,--rpath /usr/local/lib' is all about, enter at a bash prompt man ld

This post prevents the following errors:

If you get the following error (which you will get if you are doing this under CentOS 64 bit): ./memcached: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-1.3e.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
You can fix this by simply doing this: