Something I've recently discovered, if it hasn't been brought up before is a utility that makes RPM packages from a CPAN distro. I've only been using it for a week and it's already becom invaluable on a server where we're forced to run RHEL 3 (whose default perl is a somewhat broken 5.8.0 setup) because a vendor's application doesn't run on anything better.

http://perl.arix.com/cpan2rpm/

The info on the page is a little disorganized, but read through and you should be able to find the RPM, download, install and start making packages of your important modules!

I found that having a complete C/C++ toolchain installed helps big time.