The disturbing difference in your error is that the directory that it is failing to create is not the same as the one which it says you can't read. This, and the fact that your directory isn't a magical one like /usr/bin, leads me to suspect these are different problems.

Definitely the very first thing you should check is whether you do, in fact, have write permissions on /. Since you're installing perl in your home directory, I'm guessing you don't have write permission on / . Can you repeat your test on a system where you do ?

My steps to installing Devel::Cover and DBI::SQLite were as follows;

1. unpack the tar
2. perl Makefile.PL (which equates to your ./configure call)
3. grep '/usr/bin' *
4. edit Make (where I found /usr/bin in the previous step), substituting /usr/bin_00, /usr/bin_01, /usr/bin_02 etc, so I could see exactly which variable was being used
5. make
6. make test *
7. make install

So you might find something in the Make file for DynaLoader pointing to lib/auto, but I wouldn't hope for much. Finding references to / is going to be impossible.

* make test failed for Devel::Cover due to a different problem.