Hi Sandy
You will have to put in the initial effort to understand the unix environment, but it will pay of in the long term is my advise, and you will have an equally stable(if not more resilent) server installation with your new technology environment.
Do go through the MQseries App development guide for your environment and check on linux forums about compiling modules. For anything perl related PM is your friend.
The temporal difficulty with perl is u need to know C well to know the awesome.else u just keep *using* it and writing inefficient code