Can you get Net::SOCKS to run. You should be able to modify the code below to do a get from the SOCKS proxy. If you can get this to work, I don't think that it will be hard to make LWP work with it.

use Net::SOCKS;

my $sock = new Net::SOCKS(socks_addr => '192.168.1.3',
            socks_port => 1080,
            user_id => 'the_user',
            user_password => 'the_password',
            force_nonanonymous => 1,
            protocol_version => 5); 

# connect to http port and request /index.html
my $f= $sock->connect(peer_addr => '192.168.1.3', peer_port => 80);
print $f "GET /index.html\n";    # example writing to socket
while (<$f>) { print }     # example reading from socket
$sock->close();
[download]

See this example: http://mlawire.blogspot.com/2009/07/using-lwp-with-tor.html

libwww (the C library that LWP wraps) has some support for SOCKS proxies, but it seems that this functionality is not available from perl.

I can see two work arounds:

1) the difficult one: go hacking inside LWP and make the SOCKS support available in perl. Don't forget to submmit a patch to the maintainer ;-)

2) the no so difficult one: code an standalone HTTP proxy => SOCKS gateway. Maybe you can do it combining HTTP::Proxy and Net::SOCKS or IO::Socket::Socks.

You can also check LWP alternatives like curl or neon, both have perl wrappers, though I doubt they can support SOCKS either.

You can just open a local socket and have it connect to the SOCKS server. So you give LWP an address like http://localhost:8080/.
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Update: added code sample
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.

What do you mean?

You need to talk using the SOCKS protocol with the SOCKS server, so you need a gateway between LWP (than can only talk to HTTP proxies) and the SOCKS server

(after the update) I see, but this aproach is going to fail in all but the simplest cases: if the remote server runs several virtual servers, if it includes absolute URLs in some response or in redirects, etc.