Why on earth anyone would want to use Activestate anywhere other than Windows is beyond me

(Like you, I felt that the OP is using ActivePerl on Linux ... I'm not entirely positive that's the case.) I guess that you might like to use ActivePerl on Linux if the Perl that you have access to is a non-devel (ie crippled) build, or if you didn't want to go to the trouble of building perl yourself, or if you didn't have access to (or feel competent with) a C compiler. There may be other reasons.

Even on Windows there are now better alternatives, such as Strawberry Perl

That's a *very* subjective appraisal of Strawberry Perl. For one thing, Strawberry Perl doesn't come with a PPM utility - therefore if you want to install anything that needs a third party library (eg Math::GMP, XML::Parser) then you first need to install that third party library. With ActivePerl, you can often find a PPM package that doesn't need that third party library.

The MinGW installation that ships with Strawberry Perl does not include the fortran compiler (g77). Therefore any modules that rely on g77 (eg PGPLOT, PDL) will not build on Strawberry Perl, though they will build seamlessly on ActivePerl (if you're using a fully functional MinGW installation).

Hopefully, some of these issues will be addressed with the next release of Strawberry Perl - which is, I agree, "on the right track".

Cheers,
Rob

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