Hello. Hi. I'm very new here, I hope this is the right place. I'm running SUSE10.1, and I notice that there are a bunch of perl mods listed under yast. Are these some of the same modules that I can install via CPAN? Will Yast see what CPAN installs and vice versa?

This is a kind of question that comes out quite often, either in the context of some distro community, or in a Perl-related one, with an overall preference for the particular distro's package tools in the former case and for CPAN in the latter, not surprisingly. Indeed, there are advantages to both approaches, as has been discussed here too. Now it seems to me that nobody has mentioned CPANPLUS yet, which supports creation of packages of one's choice through the cpan2dist tool: not all distros are targeted yet, but many "major" ones are, and it shouldn't be too difficult to add others, although I've not really investigated it yet. This makes for great news, since to some extent it "saves the best from both worlds!"