Answer: whichever one you're comfortable with.

In fact, that could be a Windows box, Mac OS X, VMS or any other OS you want to hack on. If you really want to learn Perl and not get distracted by a bunch of fiddling around and learning a new OS, learn Perl on the OS you know the best. That way, instead of figuring out why your video card uses 8K stacks but your OS only supports 4K stacks^*, why your shiny new editor won't indent properly or you command line doesn't autocomplete on tab, you'll be learning the joys of map versus foreach.

Ovid's wisdom shines above, but see also comments by inman and gellyfish below.

You have enough box there (assuming reasonable drives) to go for a multi-boot arrangement, or for virtual systems tools. And unless your time/ambition is constrained badly, ready access to multiple OSen may be very useful as you start to deal with certain types of problems.

jm$.02w

Multi-boot: to each his own, but if you start playing with running your own servers, it'll get kinda painful. Webservers are a dime a dozen - you probably don't care that someone else can't get to your site when you've booted the other OS. SMTP servers, however, are a bit more of a problem. If you are in the wrong OS when an email comes in, it'll bounce, and cause lots of people headaches - especially you. So, multiboot if you must, but beware of some limitations.

Virtual tools: I ran VMWare + WinXP on my 1.8GHz/1GB RAM box for years. And it's not all it's cracked up to be for heavy-duty hacking. It's fine for testing purposes, but you don't really want to be leaving a hosted system running all the time. You can run your SMTP server on the host OS, but obviously not on the hosted (virtual) OS.

Also, a virtual OS can become really, really slow. I have a 1.2GHz laptop running WinXP, and it absolutely blew my virtual WinXP box away on handling the same problems. It was an unbelievable difference. So far, on my new box, I've not yet installed any virtualisation software. I'm not sure I'm going to, either. For small (<60 seconds running time) scripts, it may be reasonable (and thus it may be reasonable for the OP), but for heavy-duty stuff that the OP may get into, be forewarned.

Update: This may sound like I'm talking about production machines. I'm not - I like to play with my SMTP server - it's both development and production at the same time. How else can I learn about this stuff without having some live server running? :-) Even the virtual machine - I have both development and production use here. I want a machine that I can both play with and actually accomplish stuff with, so I have both development and production uses. At work, however, I try to keep a larger distinction between machines. So I'm not talking about that - I think I'm in a similar boat to the OP, with at least the obvious difference that I have a clear idea in my head of how I want to develop with perl, and the OP is still discovering how s/he wants to develop with perl. All I can offer the OP is my experiences and let him/her discern how that applies to him/her ;-)

The real beauty of Perl is that you can hack on what ever platform you are most comfortable with and then "port" your code over to another platform and have a 95% chance of it working right the first time. (I don't say 100%, because I have been bitten more than once by CPAN modules that I forgot I installed on the dev-box. But, since they are on CPAN, that is easily remedied.)

That said, working on one of the *nix flavors is my personal preference, particularly if I am going to be building and software from source. (But then, I am old-fashioned, after all.) I always get into snarling contests when I start working with compilers/linkers/nmake under a Windows OS.

Perl in Windows is bearable though, I use it often (by necessity). Linux is what I'd recommend, just feels more natural. Any Unix-like OS would probably be about the same. This is a bit of a religious argument however, all a matter of opinion.

It really depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to be able to play with almost anything out there, the various Linux distributions are among your best bet. If you have a goal of getting most things out there to work with Windows ... well, good luck, and you obviously need Windows. Before someone thinks me facetious here, I do understand how some people feel a need to get things to work the way they work rather than getting themselves to work the way others work. That would explain why I stayed on OS/2 for so long ;-)

Personally, when I got my 1.8GHz/1GB RAM box, I slapped RH7.2 on it immediately. I then upgraded to RH7.3 pretty much right away. And then to RHEL3. Getting another box, I've slapped Gentoo on it. Interestingly enough, I had no qualms compiling new versions of perl on the RH system, but am finding myself a bit reluctant to go compile the latest perls on Gentoo. Wierd.

Anyway, I'm an anti-MS bigot (well, just anti-MS-crappy-software - some of their stuff, like MSWord or MSVC, are pretty good), so take my suggestions with significant portions of flavour-enhancers. For popularity that helps ensure most modules will work, I suggest Linux. And even there, I'm starting to see why Gentoo is a good choice - I've had much less in the way of problems in getting things like Gtk and Tk and GD and other such modules compiled on Gentoo than I did on RH.

Warning: it took my 3.2GHz, hyper-threaded, 4GB RAM box about 48 hours to compile KDE. So if you take my advice to go with Gentoo, count on it taking a while. ;-) All told, this machine probably spent about 100 hours compiling Linux to get the system running with everything, and probably has spent another 80-100 hours since then compiling upgrades. Of course, you don't need to upgrade if things are working, I'm just doing it because I can. ;-)

Whichever OS doesn't get in your way.

If you have to spend your time patching it, rebuilding the kernel whenever you install something, retuning the security, or otherwise maintain it, I view that as a problem. I don't even like patching my MacOS X box once a month, as I have to reboot it, which is really messing up my uptime.

And well, if you have to learn a whole new OS, that's probably going to be an inconvenience, too.

Sell it and buy an iMac.

Ah, I didn't read the part about flame wars...

Seriously though, I've been developing perl on an iMac for 2 years now and I've been very pleased with it.

I like Linux, because it gives me much better control over what's going on in my machine. Also, it provides an enormous array of programming tools, including the gcc compiler and front ends for all kinds of languages.

Even if you're not going to program in C or anything other than Perl, you might find yourself wanting a module that uses C and needs to be compiled. You can't always rely on the ActiveState version of Perl to contain everything you want. You'd need a compiler, and they can be expensive.

I would agree with other posters, though, that it's possible to get distracted with learning a whole new OS while you're also working on learning Perl. If this is a consideration (that is, if you actually have to *do* something with your computer), then using a familiar OS might be more reasonable.

You can't always rely on the ActiveState version of Perl to contain everything you want. You'd need a compiler, and they can be expensive.

Compiling perl and perl modules for the win32 platform is supported using three different free compilers.

Check fedora.redhat.com.

There is currently Fedora Core 4 available. It is a few releases ahead of RHEL 4, certainly bleeding edge and comes with updates.

I'll second this. Fedora aims to be pretty painless to get up and running with an easy, robust installer and it's widely used so there's good advice online. I've also heard that Ubuntu is easy to get started with, though I've not tried it personally. This assumes your primary interest is Perl and you don't want too much distraction learning/configuring a linux OS.

However, ++ what Ovid said. If you don't know unix/linux, then I wouldn't recommend starting there. Go with ActiveState on Windows.

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

Ubuntu is an excellent distribution, though it is targeted more toward "easy desktop environment for people who don't know Linux". This is either excellent or horrible, depending on your personal taste and level of experience.

It's based on Debian, and has done so many good things that the Debian team is going out of its way to establish and maintain good relationships with the Ubuntu folks, so that they (Debian) can borrow some of the nifities that Ubuntu has come out with. (Personally, I use Gentoo, but that's not a distro I'd recommend to someone who isn't a bit of a masochist, like me).

I, too, ++ to Ovid's comment. However, I would add one note of caveat emptor: Perl itself and many of the nifitiest CPAN modules were originally conceived of, developed, and tested for UNIX-like OS -- ActiveState or PxPerl on Windows are just fine, but a UNIX-like will have fewer limitations and oddities to deal with. I'd recommend using a UNIX-like OS (Linux, BSD, etc.) if you have or desire *NIX experience. Use Windows to learn Perl on only if Windows is the only OS you're really comfortable with.

<-radiant.matrix->
Larry Wall is Yoda: there is no try{} (ok, except in Perl6; way to ruin a joke, Larry! ;P)
The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
"In any sufficiently large group of people, most are idiots" - Kaa's Law

In a similar vein CoLinux hosted on Windows can also give you the best of both worlds.

/J\

If you are really interesting in testing at the bleeding edge I would suggest that you look at the Daily Build reports for bleadperl and pick on a non- or under-represented OS like, Oh I don't know, SCO UnixWare or Openserver or something ;-)

/J\

Well for that matter they don't build on AmigaOS anymore either - maybe the OP could try AROS, trying to build an Amiga Perl on UAE proved too painful for me.

If you want a bigger, pricier distro, with alot of support, automatic security updates, great support thru maillists, etc. try SuSE.</2 cents>

For linux, I've always recommended Debian. The testing and QA that goes into the package management is un-paralleled (IMO). It's *astounding* how easy it is to get packages on (and off) of a Debian machine, and it always Just Works. No muss, no fuss.

That being said, Debian isn't the fastest moving platform. I've recently experimented with Ubuntu linux. It's more or less a Debian fork, with tweaked priorities. I believe it's x86 only. It is desktop-focused, gnome-centric, and very polished. Seems a bit more simple than Debian. Releases are pre-scheduled every April and October, period.

So overall, I have a ton of experience with Debian. I recommened it heartily, but should note that I'm considering Ubuntu for my next build. (Whenever that might be...)