I'm not especially surprised. Newt hasn't seen a release in almost 15 years. Back then, Perl 5.5 was still the current stable version of Perl. Modern Perls have had API changes since then, so there would probably be problems linking them; also gcc has come a long way since then and that may cause problems too.

There's only a single PASS result on CPAN testers, so you're not the only person that has had problems.

If you can track down a machine running Perl 5.6/5.8 and gcc 2.9x, then you might have better luck building it.