I use emacs and a commercially available editor called Epsilon. Vim is a fantastic editor as well.

I highly recommend vim over vi. vim features are a superset of those in vi, so if you know vim, you can use vi. However, the extra features kick much booty and will make your programming experience much more enjoyable. If you are going to use vim, you simply must buy Steve Oualline's Vi iMproved. It is one of the best technical books on my bookshelf, and I recommend it to anyone learning either vi or vim head and shoulders over any other available books.

If you're new to the editors, you may get frustrated that there's a much steeper learning curve than with, say, Windows Notepad (hee hee). They often seem cryptic to new users. However, with much power comes much responsibility, grasshopper. Don't get frustrated and eventually you'll be able to edit your code at a speed that would be blinding to those who use the typical IDE.

While I would also recommend learning the Perl debugger from the command-line, if you like a GUI debugging environment, there is ptkdb, which runs in the Perl/Tk environment.

Of course, there is also ActiveState's Komodo, which provides a full-featured IDE. I would recommend a working knowledge of emacs and/or vi/vim even if you decide the full IDE is your bag given that (i) you can get just about everything an IDE gives you in emacs with very few exceptions (ii) emacs and vi will be on virtually every *nix machine you ever touch (as a consultant who never knows what a client will have available, that's *very* important to me) and (iii) emacs and vi/vim will be around for many many years to come with their basic functionality unchanged, where who knows for commercial products and (iv) they're free (who woulda thunk it?). I've been *dying* to try Komodo myself, and have been hoping that they get around to supporting emacs or vi keybindings. Although their focus is on the Windows market, the keybindings would endear them considerably to the *nix market.

Finally, there's Visual SlickEdit, which supports both Windows and *nix ports. While it's a commercial product, I have friends who are top-notch coders who swear up and down it's the best editor ever. "Ever!" they would say. It even supports keybindings that emulate editors such as emacs and Epsilon.

You should also be able to upgrade Perl from within the CPAN module. That would be my recommendation, as Perl is smarter about upgrading itself (e.g., where to put things) than rpm. Just enter the CPAN shell with

perl -MCPAN -e shell

and type help.

Hope this helps :-)