Best software for cranking out Perl scripts? emacs! or vi! it's all about learning to use the tool efficiently. I use emacs as I like its modelessness more than vi's modedness-- and emacs does more than just edit text. I use vi by accident once in a while. For plain old Perl I think the jury is still out. :)

For the newer version, if you can find an RPM that's the way to go since you will be less likely to have issues with the RPM database that way. But installing from CPAN source is mostly painless in my experience.

Since you have the Linux environment, take a good look at managing your programming projects with CVS (concurrent version system). This provides a backup (even if it's on the same drive) and a changes history. That way you can always get your last version of the script back if you need to, without having a drive full of script_v1.pl, script_v2.pl, script_v3.pl... And since you may become addicted to cheap Linux machines (I know I am-- after all, now you have a development machine, you'll need a DB server and an Apache server next, right *wink*), CVS makes creating central code repositories easier down the road.