This guide is based on various community forum posts.

This guide is intended as a relatively easy step by step guide to:

• Install and configure memcached and memcache PHP extension on openSuSE 11.1 and higher for use with Drupal and the Drupal Memcache module.
• This is a very basic single memcached server setup but a good starting point for getting memcached working. 

Requirements:

• openSUSE 11 or later installed on your machine. 
• PHP 5.2.0 or higher installed

1. Install memcached on your server.

• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

yast2 -i memcached

2. Install memcache PHP extension using PECL.

• PECL is great for installing PHP extensions.
• For instructions on How To install PECL on openSUSE click here.
• After you have installed PECL on your system, open the Terminal Window and enter :

pecl install memcache

3. Add memcache.so to php.ini

• We must instruct PHP to load the extension.
• You can do this by adding a file named memcache.ini to the configuration directory /etc/php5/conf.d
• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

gedit /etc/php5/conf.d/memcache.ini

• Add the following line to the file and save :

extension=memcache.so

• If you intend to use memcached with Drupal also add the following line to your php.ini or memcache.ini file and save :

memcache.hash_strategy="consistent"

4. Add memcached to system startup.

• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

chkconfig --add memcached

5. Open firewall port 11211.

• The default port for the memcached server is TCP port 11211.
• Configure your firewall to open port 11211 for TCP traffic.
• Tip : Use YAST to cofigure your firewall if you are using SUSEFirewall2

6. Configure the memcached allowed memory.

• All memcached configuration settings can be found in /etc/sysconfig/memcached
• The default memory setting for memcached is 64 MB. 
• Depending on the amount of RAM available on the server allocate a block of memory to memcached.
• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

gedit /etc/sysconfig/memcached

• Change the following line FROM-

MEMCACHED_PARAMS="-d -l 127.0.0.1"

• TO the following by adding the -m 4096 bit to allow memcached 4 GB of RAM. Adjust the size in MB according to the memory that you have available. Save the file when done.

MEMCACHED_PARAMS="-m 4096 -d -l 127.0.0.1"

7. Start the memcached service.

• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

service memcached start

8. Restart Apache.

• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

service apache2 restart

9. Check to see if memcached server is active and listening on port 11211.

• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

netstat -tap | grep memcached

10. Check the status and stats with memcached-tool

• Part of the memcached package is a handy tool called memcached-tool.
• You need to specify the host IP and port. In this case the host IP is 127.0.0.1 and the port 1211.
• Open the Terminal Window and enter :

memcached-tool 127.0.0.1:11211 stats

11. Activate the Drupal memcached module.

• Install the Drupal Memcache module and activate. For more complete instructions visit the Drupal Memcache Documentation
• Edit settings.php in your Drupal installation to include memcache.inc
• For Drupal 6, edit the settings.php file and add the following :

$conf['cache_inc'] ='sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc';

• For Drupal 7, edit the settings.php file and add the following :

$conf['cache_backends'][] = 'sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.inc';
$conf['cache_default_class'] = 'MemCacheDrupal';
$conf['memcache_key_prefix'] = 'something_unique';

* note : Replace the "something_unique" in the last line with your own unique memcache key prefix.