Hello NERDVANA (cool handle :-)): if you have gnuplot installed do 'man gnuplot' and scroll down to:

ENVIRONMENT
       A number of shell environment variables are understood by gnuplot.  None
       of these are required.

       GNUTERM
              The name of the terminal type to be used by default.  This can be
              overridden by the gnuplotrc, .gnuplot, or
              $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnuplot/gnuplotrc start-up files and, of course,
              by later explicit "set terminal" commands.

TERM is not mentioned. I can find no ref to this variable in any of the PDL/Perl POD, which means it can't be preset outside of a gnuplot environment (that's why the module build failed.) It is a gnuplot paramater, syntactic sugar to preset the engine for use by clients (a neat client/server model facilitated by Alien). In PDL literature there is only the notion of passing an actual terminal alias string in the graphics interface constructor (or using the engine's default) using the pipe mechanism established in Alien. It is no easy task getting PDL up and running. Do you think I'm right to criticise the PDL devs for NOT discussing this in installation instructions? Cheers,

Will