For those who are interested, I finally got it to work!! Yeah. Trail and error methodology....but who cares?

The problem seemed to be the midi_device needs to be 1,2,3,or 4 for my SBlive. Which corresponds to ports 65:0 , 65:1 , 65:2 , 65:3 . The midi_device defaults to 0 which is probably 64:0, and is the kernel MPU. Anyways the following works for my SBlive. :-) (Now to get it to write to my USB midi interface)

UPDATE: Upon further testing, I found that my problem was caused by interference from the usb-hotplug interface for my UM-1 Midikeyboard connector. MIDI::Realtime works as described below, if hotplug is NOT started. If hotplug is started, the "bad file descriptor" error reappears. It was a funny bug, which really threw me off in my troubleshooting.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use MIDI::Realtime;
use diagnostics;

my $midi = MIDI::Realtime->new(dev=>'/dev/sequencer',
                               midi_device=> 1);   # 1,2,3 or4

# Play note 47 with maximum velocity on channel 1 
$midi->note(47,1,127);

# Now have some fun with randomness 

my @notes      = (37 .. 50);
# use all the channels (with extra drums) 
my @channels   = (1 .. 16, 10, 10, 10);
my @velocities = (70 .. 100);

for (0 .. 127) {
  $midi->note($notes[rand(@notes)],
  $channels[rand(@channels)],
  $velocities[rand(@velocities)]
);

# Wait for a tenth of a second 
select(undef,undef,undef, 0.10);
}
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