Don't try to run it from the browser (i.e. via CGI) yet! Does it work from the command-line first? You have to take things one step at a time. So, first you need to figure out: can you connect to the mysql db manually, what password and user-name have you setup, etc.. This may not be a PERL problem at all! Also, if you don't know the user/password you may seriously want to consider reinstalling MySQL again so that you know exactly how it is set up.