It also says on that page that ActivePerl comes with graphics libraries included. I'd still like to be able to install modules, of course, but maybe the whole exercise of installing GD specifically is a little pointless if it's already installed. If I understand it right, I now have both ActivePerl and the other Perl (as well as the older version which the other users are stuck with). But where are they? How do I access ActivePerl instead of the other one?

With your vendor's or system's perl, you'd normally just enter perl some_script.pl; however, with ActivePerl, unless you specifically changed policy to make it your system perl, you have to use the full path to ActivePerl. On my system, the full path is

/opt/ActivePerl-5.14/bin/perl
[download]

Your path will most likely be different. To use ppm, again you'd do something similar such as:

/opt/ActivePerl-5.14/bin/ppm install Some::Module
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There, I found it, in usr/local. And it has GD installed, so that much seems to work now. Thank you!

It seems a little silly to have two different versions, but maybe that's okay. I'd still like to see if I can get the other one to work as well, but at least this is a big improvement.

Now I'm trying to install SDL, but neither version is very keen on that. The CPAN program spends a good while installing dependencies, and then tells me that "install seems impossible":

Undefined subroutine &My::Builder::Darwin::rel2abs called at inc/My/Bu
+ilder/Darwin.pm line 115.
  FROGGS/SDL-2.536.tar.gz
  ./Build -- NOT OK
Running Build test
  Can't test without successful make
Running Build install
  Make had returned bad status, install seems impossible
Failed during this command:
 FROGGS/SDL-2.536.tar.gz                      : make NO
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And the PPM program has never heard of SDL, although it provides something called "Alien-SDL" which I've installed but don't know what to do with.

EDIT: Well, I tried downloading the package and installing it manually, and that gave the same error about "rel2abs". Somewhat desperate, I edited the Darwin.pm file myself, which felt very very wrong. A quick googling suggested that "File::Spec" was needed, so I added that to the file. Now the testing went fine, and the install didn't seem to have any problems either. Unfortunately neither of the Perl versions acknowledges that I have installed SDL. So maybe it ended up in a third place.