Many thanks to Michael Peppler. I went to the website,
http://www.peppler.org/downloads/ActiveState.
Downloaded the sybperl-2.17_3, unzip it.
Added to the list of repositories and PPM was able to install it.
It is working now.

I looked all over www.activeState.com and could not find the module for Perl 5.8.X. In fact the site there lists the build status for sybperl-2.17 (for perl 5.8XX) as "FAIL". I guess that is out of date. --Kam