Perl if a very solid programming language that’s been around for a long time. Highly flexible, very easy to find documentation and examples and it’s free!
Beaglebone ships with a version that just doesn’t quite cut it out of the box though (Throws errors sometimes? Hard to install modules – I don’t know why). So I decided to show how to remove the existing perl installation, download the source and compile yourself.
So lets kick off by saying if you haven’t backed up your system – do it!
Next we’ll remove the old installation, download the source, decompress it and configure it. Try executing:
opkg remove perl* --force-depends --force-remove wget http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.14.2.tar.gz gzip -d ./perl-5.14.2.tar.gz tar -xvf ./perl-5.14.2.tar cd perl-5.14.2 ./Configure -d prefix=/usr/local/perl
Go make your self a coffee – this takes a little while to process, towards the end of the process you may be asked to press enter. Do it!
Next make:
make
Maybe go for a walk this time – takes a fair bit longer.
make install
Alright next we’re going to run CPAN and let it run it’s initial scripts:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
If you get error saying something about /CPAN/MyConfig.pm and not returning true do the following:
echo "1;" > ~/.cpan/CPAN/MyConfig.pm
Now just keep pressing enter till you get a cpan prompt ‘cpan>’ then type exit!
So how many people still with me? I hope that was straight forward enough – hope it helps.
If you’re installing Perl and/or Perl modules, check out “perlbrew” and “cpanminus” (usually called cpanm). They make building your own Perl, and installing modules, really easy.
For what it’s worth, it might be easier to go with a distribution like Ubuntu on the BeagleBone — Ubuntu 12.04 comes with Perl 5.14 out of the box, and with a lot of modules already available via the package manager — and others have been easy to build and install so far.
I’m not really sure about the advantages of Angstrom – I have to admit I’ve barely used it, and jumped straight to the ubuntu distro because I’m familiar with it.
Yeah, this is true, but I am trying to support Angstrom because that’s what most people will be running, “out of the box”.