One other caveat I would throw out there, and maybe this is just something funky with our solaris boxes at the office, but we find that the installed modules sometimes need to be chmod'd so that they can be usable (for some reason, things come out 0440 and 0660 - no world permission to, say, load the module ;) ). Other than that, read the faq (http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html)