Looks like there may be some build problems with 0.26 right now. (I certainly can't build on Debian w/ 2.6.10). Check out the CPAN bug report.

Update: I got a good build after apt-get install libdb4.1 libdb4.1-dev.

Update 2: Looks like your 'or die' is getting passed into the ErrFile. That's not part of the filename! Try moving it out of the new() alltogether.

This seems to return OK:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use BerkeleyDB;
use strict;

my $env = new BerkeleyDB::Env
        -Config =>
                {DB_DATA_DIR => "/tmp",
                 DB_LOG_DIR => "/tmp",
                 DB_TMP_DIR => "/tmp"},
        -Verbose    => 1,
        -Flags => DB_CREATE
        -ErrFile    => *STDOUT
        ;


if (not defined($env)) {
       die "Database environment initialization failed: $!";
}
[download]