Not too convinced with doing manual installs, as these will have to be done over a number of machines - I'm using libssh2 0.14, while it appears the latest is 0.18.

I'm using Ubuntu, and a quick search on google showed that 0.18 packages are in debian's testing branch, so maybe a stable version will be available soon - else we can try to see if the testing package works.

Thanks for your help!