How to install Protocol Buffers

Protocol buffer (https://code.google.com/p/protobuf) is a technology made by google for automatic serialization of data to and from a compressed binary format. You can define your data in a Interface Definition Language (IDL) and then generate bindings for any language from which you want to generate the data or consume data.

To Install:

Download protobuf from https://code.google.com/p/protobuf/downloads/list to your /usr/local (why /usr/local/?)

# tar -xjvf protobuf-2.5.0.tar.bz2
# cd /usr/local/protobuf-2.5.0
# ./configure
# make
# sudo make install
# protoc --version
libprotoc 2.5.0

For detailed inforamtion:
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/source/browse/trunk/INSTALL.txt