Generally, you can't mix different binary formats in one program (i.e. executable + libs)

Yeah, that is what I was figuring.

A little more information. This is a PA-RISC 2.0 system, library from vendor is an interface library, precompiled, and we <paraphrase>should have a compatable version of PERL (sic) for, get the source from www.cpan.org</paraphrase> blah blah blah. Of course there are no instructions as to what flags it needs, the Makefile.PL is definitely not perlish (it is called only for the "make uninstall" and "make install" targets, rest of commands, all common make targets, are done with an install.sh script), etc. I cannot say that I have seen anyone who "speaks Perl" there.

Vendors library is SOM, and my perl is ELF, so I was guessing that I would need to recompile in 32-bit SOM mode. Oh well.

I have the SA searching out a 32-bit gcc, and will be re-running my system build script using that. I guess I wait for the next upgrade (12 months or so) to go to 64-bit. Maybe by then they will support Itanium.

Oh well, this is starting to turn into a rant / gripe, so I should probably just leave it at that. Thanks for your feedback.