I recently discovered the wonders of encryption / decryption using PHP and MCrypt. So this is just some notes to help me keep track of my progress with it (since I consider myself to be a Linux newbie STILL)... hopefully it attracts some comments, suggestions and corrections.

Getting the mcrypt library

1. Go to http://mcrypt.hellug.gr/lib/index.html and download the appropriate version for yourself.
2. As soon as you've extracted the files, run ./configure with the required options. On my first attempt my configure line was:
   
   Code:

   ./configure --disable-posix-threads

3. After running make and make install, you're done with installing the mcrypt library.

Installing PHP --with-mcrypt
This was my configure line for PHP:

As usual, as soon as you're done with make and make install for PHP, start Apache / Httpd and you can start writing, testing and experimenting your PHP encryption / decryption scripts (using mcrypt).