Thanks everyone for the help so far. I installed apache2 on suse 9.1. I modified the conf script and ensured that the permissions on /srv/www/htdocs were ok but although I can read the test page for Apache I cant get to read the index.html page. It says
You don't have permission to access the requested object. It is either read-protected or not readable by the server
I know this isnt a perl question, but thought I would ask anyway, if anyone has any suggestion as to how to sort this out because it is driving me nuts!