Unfortunately, Kwiki still is the easiest software to install. I installed Socialtext in a Debian VMWare Player box, and the only way I got it to succeed was by adding the Socialtext repository and installing all packages from there. Using the Debian-provided packages or the CPAN-provided packages didn't work out. I cannot recommend installing the plethora of prerequisites into a Perl installation that will be used for other stuff, as there are some Perl packages that need to be force-installed.

On the upside, in the end I got a working image of a "drop-in" machine that will supply a very nice and functional wiki, but the VMWare image is 400MB, so I haven't put it up for download yet. The script I used to do the download/installation of Socialtext currently lives at http://datenzoo.de/pub/install-opentext.txt, but it carries some cruft that could be removed I think. I will likely look at the script in the next few days and clean it up some more, and then post it in this node or as a reply here.