It's not PHPProject or CDSite, either. I found those just now searching for it, and those aren't it.

Ah, here it is: Server2Go. It doesn't seem to have Perl in its default distribution. There are additional things one can download for it, and some of it is "donation required". I'm wondering if that's where Perl support is. The version info for my copy indeed says it's ActiveState's perl. It's seems it's just repackaged and such, so it should really file under ActivePerl for all indents and porpoises.

BTW, the repackaging effort to make installation not required and to make the servers autostart from a CD didn't end up working well for me anyway, and I rewrote most of that. I'd recommend against the specific package, as there appear to be lots of other options for the same needs without even rolling your own.

I'm trying to solve the problem of autostart from CD without installation using XAMPP. I can't get apache.exe to start in the background, e.g. the script always waits. I am about to try Strawberry Perl and Win32::Process, but I would much rather use the perl that comes with XAMPP and find another way. I was wondering if the last poster would share his solution --Gerry

I did use the Create() method for Win32::Process to start Apache in the background. Be sure you're using the flags CREATE_NO_WINDOW and DETACHED_PROCESS (or'ed together, like so:

CREATE_NO_WINDOW|DETACHED_PROCESS
[download]

so that the whole call looks similar to:

my $apache_obj;
Win32::Process::Create(
    $apache_obj,
    "\\ws\\server\\Apache\\Apache.exe",
    "apache -f $apache_dir\\httpd.conf",
    0,
    CREATE_NO_WINDOW|DETACHED_PROCESS,
    "."
) || die "Starting webserver: $!\n";
[download]

There are some other things to think about like how you get the working directory set up, where your Apache config will be, whether it all stays on the CD or if you use a temporary directory, and a few more issues. Using the proper flags should get your process detached and windowless, though. See the Win32::Process documentation for even more flags. You might want to cross-check those against some Microsoft docs, too, but I don't recall exactly where those docs are.