. You need to have the underlying C libraries in place and sadly CPAN has no way of specifying such dependencies. I cannot speak for non-debian systems, but this really messes up what one would hope is a smooth install. I'm thinking of trying to use the debian packaging system much more as that can express these sort of dependencies. I think in windows the perl distributions come with their own packaging systems, but then you have a much more limited set of up-to-date modules and I am not sure how well they handle external dependencies.