I usually look for a lot and read a lot to fix my problems, but for this particular problem it was rather unforgivable.
I am running a 64-bit Linux Ubuntu server on which I installed the LAMP stack and had problems with libcurl support that does not support SSL, while the OS binary has SSL support. PHP just can't read it. When I searched for solutions and tried the following to enable ssl support when installing PHP, I had a problem.
./configure ....
...
....
/usr/bin/ld: ext/standard/.libs/info.o: relocation R_X86_64_32 against `.rodata.str1.1' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
ext/standard/.libs/info.o: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [libphp5.la] Error 1
So it suddenly stopped. I tried making arguments --enable-shared --without-pic to no avail.