Help installing cURL

[kday33]

I've been using PHP in a LAMP configuration with ubuntu-linux and apache2.  I've been trying to get cURL to work for the past two days, and I'm not sure what the problem is.  I've never manually added any PHP extensions, and I don't know Linux very well.  I have downloaded and unpackaged cURL and can get it to work from the command line.  I can't get it to work from PHP though.

I know that there is a way to recompile PHP with a command "./configure --with-curl" , but I can't find the configure file in PHP to do this.  I used the ubuntu installer, and that said it was successful, but I still can't use cURL at all from PHP and my phpinfo() page doesn't show cURL at all.

Any ideas for I can try to get cURL to work?

Thanks in advance.