Upgrading OpenSSL on Debian 6 (squeeze) or Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy)

The Problem on the long term ubuntu 8.04 and the current stable debian is that they ship the old OpenSSL 0.9.8o With that I wasn’t able to compile the new apache 2.4.1 with all the SSL features I want. Downloading the OpenSSL source and just configure make make install didn’t help at all.

checking whether to enable mod_ssl... checking dependencies
checking for OpenSSL... checking for user-provided OpenSSL base directory... none
checking for OpenSSL version >= 0.9.7... FAILED
configure: WARNING: OpenSSL version is too old
no
checking whether to enable mod_ssl... configure: error: mod_ssl has been requested but can not be built due to prerequisite failures
mario@h2020668:~/apache24/httpd-2.4.1$ openssl version
OpenSSL 0.9.8o 01 Jun 2010

The only thing that helped was to use the unix config script plus the right prefix plus the shared option

wget http://openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1.tar.gz
tar xfz openssl-1.0.1.tar.gz
cd openssl-*
./config --prefix=/usr zlib-dynamic --openssldir=/etc/ssl shared
make
sudo make install

Debian is very fine, but sometimes it sucks because of the lag of new software versions