Got it all to work, and I now understand that for many of the CPAN packages I want, there is a corresponding Linux package.
Dumb question, but I'll ask anyway -- can someone tell me why some CPAN modules have corresponding Linux (in my case, Ubuntu) packages? Are they for the Perl modules that have some binaries and are not pure Perl? Because some modules download fine in CPAN, and I'd doubt that there is a corresponding Linux package.
Thanks,
Matt