Yet another addendum: we just set up two Raspberries as WLAN access points using Debian:

Linux raspberrypi 3.10.25+ #622 PREEMPT Fri Jan 3 18:41:00 GMT 2014 armv6l GNU/Linux

This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for arm-linux
+-gnueabihf-thread-multi-64int
(with 88 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)
[download]

See also gcc and Perl

Regards, Karl