I agree w/ lhoward on this one.

Your configuration there looks fine, so you probably don't have mod_perl built into your httpd. Did you build it in explicitly?

In addition to using httpd -l, you can also check your error log. When you restart the webserver, you should get a line something like this:

    Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.23 configured --...
[download]

If you're not getting the mod_perl stuff, you'll need to compile it in.

For that, the mod_perl guide is a great source of information on everything mod_perl.