This error means that the OpenSSL you're linking against doesn't have support for ECC. Some distributions do this because of (perceived) patent issues.
If you compile OpenSSL yourself it should work, but make sure that it is actually using your compiled version of that library at run time, and not picking the OS one.
(ie, either use something like LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point it at the right .so, check with `ldd` command, or link OpenSSL statically so it's not an issue)
I did do this exact thing -- edited as per this (where it pointed to the actual paths):
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_PATH="/usr/local/ssl/include"
export OPENSSL_LIB_PATH="/usr/local/ssl/lib"
I will check LDD -- I actually didn't do that yet.
MD
