SOLVED !!!

Thank you all very much for your replies.

The hint to build perl as non-root user was the key to the solution. Apparently my build machine was somehow screwed up which caused the Configure script to fail when started as root. As soon as I ran it as my personal user it worked like a charm, at least with the most basic parameters. As I'm going to use this perl to connect to an oracle database I maybe have to find out what the best options might be to be used together with gcc.

Again, thank you very much for your support.

Regards, Andreas