Installing a perl module the “old-fashioned way” (manually)

Today I installed a couple of Linux gMail notifiers which I read about on TechCityInc.  I installed two of the applications, however I prefer CheckGmail.  I found that the other application I considered, GmailNotifier, did not look very good in my Ubuntu distro running inside a Sun VirtualBox (xVM) at 1024×768.

When I went to run CheckGmail, I received some errors indicating that I was missing a number of required Perl modules.  I attempted to download and install the required ones via Synaptic, but I didn’t have much luck with Gtk2::Sexy, Crypt::Blowfish, or Crypt::Simple.  Next I went to CPAN to download the missing modules.   Hint: search for the EXACT module name, including the colons.  I downloaded the modules, yet I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with them.  I found the answer at CosmicScripts.com.  Of course the information can also be found at CPAN perl module instructions as well, which I found after the fact.

• Move the Perl module tarball into a working or staging directory.
• Unpack the tarball using tar zxvf <tarball name>
• Create the make file with the command perl Makefile.PL
• Run make test
• Run make install

Done.

Additional information about the Perl install can be found with Perl commands, which I found at NixCraft.