Thanks for the replies - they were helpful.

Unfortunately, I have another issue. I decided to install Cairo, manually, in a non-standard location - ~/lib. When trying to create the makefile, I got an expected dependency error (I want to take all the steps). After installing that dependency (ExtUtils-Depends) then trying the MakeMaker step for Cairo again, I get the same dependency error.

Prior to this I made sure @INC had ~/lib as the first entry.

What confuses me is that the dependency is not only at that location, it's at others along @INC. Apparently this works differently than I think.

Please help!