Just for a bit of advocacy, I found debian really, really easy to install and configure. You can do a "Base install", it asks maybe a dozen questions total, most of which seemed fairly obvious to me (configure keybord, add accounts, configure network, etc) and then you have a nice clean base system with basically nothing running. Nothing running = no security holes.

After that, assuming you have the network setup, a simple apt-get install apache-perl and bam, you've got apache 1.3x and mod_perl 1.x set up properly. =]. Obviously you still have to configure the various bits, but I found it simple and easy at least.