ls -l /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/bin/perl

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     other 11 Jul 25 00:18  /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/bin
+/perl -> perl-static
[download]

That's still a symlink...  It's probably easier to use option -L, which dereferences across any levels of links...

Also, what happens, if you try calling /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/bin/perl -v and /opt/ActivePerl-5.8/bin/perl -e'require 5.008.8' manually? Apparently, that's failing from within ExtUtils::MakeMaker (or more precisely, ExtUtils::MM_Unix)...