Take this with a grain of salt since it's been a few years since I've worked with Oracle. Here's what I remember:

1. add an entry similar to this to /etc/ld.so.conf

   /path/to/oracle/home

2. run 'ldconfig'

Note: 1 & 2 should solve your .so error.

3. this is what we did in each perl script that accessed
   Oracle:

      #!/usr/bin/perl -w
      BEGIN {
        $ENV{ORACLE_HOME} = "/path/to/oracle/home";
      }

      ### the rest of your script goes here ###
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HTH.