in reply to extutils::makemaker

Did this really happen? If so, your Perl installation has been severely crippled, and I think it would be unadvisable to keep using such a badly administered Perl. You spell the module extutils::makemaker, but the real name of it is ExtUtils::MakeMaker - did you verify that the module is not installed with this code?

perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker -e1

If it still tells you that it can't find ExtUtils::MakeMaker, you can try to install ExtUtils::MakeMaker manually by copying the relevant files into a private directory. Please mind that ExtUtils::MakeMaker consists of several files, so MakeMaker.pm alone won't suffice.

(Untested) Steps for manually installing ExtUtils::MakeMaker locally.

  1. Go to http://www.cpan.org, and download ExtUtils::MakeMaker. You want the latest stable release.
  2. Download the .tar.gz
  3. Unpack it into a separate temporary directory
  4. Create a local directory in your home directory, say, /home/user/anonymous/perl-lib. This will be your private Perl library directory.
  5. Take all files in the lib/ directory, and copy them into your private Perl library directory (/home/user/anonymous/perl-lib in the example)
  6. Test that everything looks better via
    perl -I~/perl-lib -MExtUtils::MakeMaker -e1
    (no error there means everything works)
  7. Set the environment variable PERL5LIB to /home/user/anonymous/perl-lib, assuming that is the full path to your home directory. Check if that worked:
    perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker
  8. Alternatively add the following line to the top of all your scripts that use ExtUtils::MakeMaker:
    use lib '~/perl-lib';

These steps try to guide you through installing the latest version of ExtUtils::MakeMaker. A safer/saner approach might be to try to install the exact version that came with your version of Perl. For that, you need the following additional steps:

  1. Determine your Perl version:
    perl -v
    Let's pretend you have version 5.8.2
  2. Locate your Perl version on http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/CPAN/src/
  3. Download the .tar.gz file
  4. Unpack the .tar.gz file
  5. Take the files in lib/ExtUtils and the file ExtUtils.pm in the directory lib, and manually copy these into your private directory.
  6. Set up your environment or script like above.