If you're looking for an easy life, leave the system perl alone. You can go the Local::Lib route while running the system perl. I prefer to build my own perl elsewhere on the system. This means you can use a more modern perl than your OS supplies (I often have to work with older OS, e.g. Solaris ships with v5.8). To do this manually, unpack the download:

./Configure -des -Dprefix=$HOME/localperl
make test
make install
[download]

A lot of people use perlbrew to do this for them, or to run multiple perls.