anonymized user 468275 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks

So the start of this story is that ten years ago I switched from Linux to Windows to take advantage of certain software I needed. But the latest Windows 10 of April 2018 hit me on Wednesday with a catch 22 bug. It wouldn't update owing to obsolete SDIs but when I removed those from the registry I couldn't log back in because the upgrade had mad Windows dependent on them. So it's goodbye Windows forever now and time to catch up on the latest Linux distros - in any case, my Perl/Postgres project was destined to be migrated to linux at some time.

I started with Linux Mint, where using vim I grepped all the C:/Users/simon -> /home/simon and similarly with all the locations of postgres tools which my test suite needs to run to refresh the test env.

After successfully installing one module needed by cpanm, it wouldn't install Term::ReadKey. It appeared that cc wasn't working in spite of pointing to gcc. But because the latest gcc was already delivered with Mint, I would have to manually configure /usr/bin/cc to point to /usr/bin/gcc. One cursory effort and a can of worms opened up - much more is needed to configure cc to use gcc it seems and I don't want to overhack my distro.

So the next distro to try, Ubuntu escaped the problem by an ironic means: because it had an older gcc delivered, I was able to simply do a clean install of gcc and everything was hunky dory for perl installations.

But it seems a shame to ditch Mint with its nice UI over this. Anyone had similar experiences?

Thanks!

One world, one people

  • Comment on problem installing perl modules under Linux Mint

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Re: problem installing perl modules under Linux Mint
by marto (Cardinal) on Jul 13, 2018 at 08:36 UTC

    Are you using the system perl, that ships with Mint? If so you should be using your systems package management tool to install modules.

    "After successfully installing one module needed by cpanm"

    Are you sure App::cpanminus:

    "It's dependency free (can bootstrap itself), requires zero configuration, and stands alone. When running, it requires only 10MB of RAM"

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Re: problem installing perl modules under Linux Mint
by hda (Chaplain) on Jul 13, 2018 at 10:51 UTC

    As others have pointed out, the best thing to do is leave the system's perl as it is and install your own. We recently had some discussion on that (How should I manage CPAN when using two versions of Perl in my computer?). It is very easy to do and very convenient, just compile and install any version of perl you need in "/usr/local/perls/perl-X.X.X" (see this post in Stack Overflow for reference), and then make symbolic links of the executables to "/usr/local/bin".

    If your problems arise from using different and possibly old versions of gcc, try using the utility "update-alternatives", which I find very useful (see this link).

    Good luck!

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Re: problem installing perl modules under Linux Mint
by bliako (Abbot) on Jul 13, 2018 at 08:21 UTC 
    One cursory effort and a can of worms opened up - much more is needed to configure cc to use gcc it seems and I don't want to overhack my distro.

    i think it is as simple as that:

    lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 3 Mar  3 19:21 /usr/bin/cc -> gcc

    [download]
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[d/l]
      that was of course my cursory effort which merely opened the way for more problems to appear.

      One world, one people

[reply]
        that was of course my cursory effort which merely opened the way for more problems to appear.

        Sure, what are these problems?

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Re: problem installing perl modules under Linux Mint
by Anonymous Monk on Jul 13, 2018 at 08:31 UTC
    So youre talking about a system perl install? The advice ive been hearing for past 20 uears is install yer own perl
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