If you are in a pinch and do not need very sophisticated user-management, you could probably settle for the very simple and basic ".htaccess" authentication / authorization system. The web-server will provide you with all user-data through environment-variables and of course you will have to "manage" your users yourself, which in Catalyst you would typically do through some auto routines.

PS: That being said, I installed Catalyst both on Windows and Linux ("Mandrake") and had no real problems in doing so. Yes it took several runs of CPAN to get everything in (carefully noting the dependencies it needed and sometimes installing these separately; and on Windows switching between CPAN and ppm as needed), but nothing unsurmountable. I did have root-access on both machines and that certainly helped