Welcome to the Monastery, dJJackson!

I notice that the CPAN Testers results are showing the distribution has more breakage than it does passing, so some finagling may be needed to get it to work, that, or find another distribution that does the same thing (if there is one).

I've got several Pi 2 and Pi 3 units at home, so tonight after work, I'll play around and see if there's an easy fix, and post back with my findings.

You might want to check to see what version of libusb you have installed in your OS. Based on the information in bug #113422:

This module was written back when libusb 0.14 was current. The 1.0+ versions use a different API, so compile fails.

If the version of libusb is not compatible with the older API used by the module, that could be the reason why you are unable to install the module.

How do I check the libusb version?

Just got to start looking into this now, in time to see your question.

I found to check libusb:

dpkg -l libusb*
[download]

Which outputs a slew of info like this (click the download link below it to see it without line-wrap). Note this is on my Linux Mint laptop, not a Pi, but it'll be the same command:

spek@sainai:~/repos/app-envui$ dpkg -l libusb*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/T
+rig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                   Version          Architecture     Descripti
+on
+++-======================-================-================-=========
+=========================================
ii  libusb-0.1-4:amd64     2:0.1.12-23.3ubu amd64            userspace
+ USB programming library
ii  libusb-1.0-0:amd64     2:1.0.17-1ubuntu amd64            userspace
+ USB programming library
ii  libusb-1.0-0:i386      2:1.0.17-1ubuntu i386             userspace
+ USB programming library
un  libusb0                <none>           <none>           (no descr
+iption available)
ii  libusbmuxd2            1.0.8-2ubuntu1   amd64            USB multi
+plexor daemon for iPhone and
[download]

It'll be a bit before I can test it out on my Pi(s), but when I do, I will report back with anything I can find to get this working.

Hi dJJackson,

On my various RPi devices, I find it's often easier to install the version provided by Raspbian via sudo apt-get install libdevice-usb-perl (just tested this and it works cleanly). That doesn't always get you the latest version of the module, but in my experience it's usually it's "good enough". Also, note that it's often not recommended to modify the system Perl, so if you're using cpan to install modules, I'd strongly recommend you do so in a custom built Perl.

However, what kind of a USB device is it? I find most USB devices fall into a category for which there are already Linux drivers available, such as mass storage, HID, etc. I've been doing a lot of work recently with USB-to-serial adapters, or devices that present themselves as such. Very often if you've got a "custom" USB device that supposedly needs a "custom" driver, then what has actually happened is that the vendor took some off-the-shelf USB chip and simply changed the default device ID so that the Linux drivers no longer automatically recognize it as a standard device. So it's just a matter of teaching the kernel driver the new device ID and suddenly the standard Linux drivers work perfectly :-)

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D