Recently we had to install openssl but for the 32-bit platform. This is how I did it.

wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8x.tar.gz
tar zxvf openssl-0.9.8x.tar.gz
setarch i386 ./config -m32 shared
make clean; make install

In general though for anything that you need to build the following command will work:
./configure && make && sudo make install