Apache Friends Support Forum

I've just installed XAMPP 1.7.0 on my Dell Inspiron 1545 running Windows Vista Home Premium. I also installed "Patch1 for 1.7.0" and the "Perl 5.10.0-2.2.11" add-on.

I wanted to install some additional Perl modules from CPAN so I went to my C:\XAMPP\Perl\bin directory, ran "cpan" and tried to "install CGI::Session". The installation failed because cpan couldn't find "untar". This is because C:\XAMPP\Perl\lib\CPAN\Config.pm contains paths pointing to tools in the Microsoft VisualStudio .NET installation directory. I installed equivalent tools from the GnuWin32 distribution (bzip2, gzip, make, less, patch, tar, unzip, wget) and then ran "o conf init" in cpan to reinitialise the config. To avoid this in the future I suggest you ship XAMPP/Perl *WITHOUT* the CPAN/Config.pm file - it gets autogenerated by cpan if it isn't there.

Having sorted out the tools I ran the install command again, and it failed when it tried to create a directory called "c:C:\XAMPP\perl\html\site\lib\CGI". I eventually traced this is to C:\XAMPP\perl\lib\Config_heavy.pl containing pathnames beginning with "c:C:\XAMPP\". Either this file is corrupt in the XAMPP/Perl add-on distribution, or the installer screws it up when it replaces whatever path was there originally with the one I've installed XAMPP to. Either way, removing the stray "c:" at the start of the path allowed cpan to work.

It's worth mentioning that I also had to install NMAKE-1.5 from microsoft.com to get cpan installation to work for the Cache::Cache package, which is a prerequisite of HTML::Mason, which is the whole reason I'm installing XAMPP etc in the first place.

Finally, I did try going to bugs.xampp.org to report this bug but this site isn't responding.

The last few perl addons have not included the full ActiveState's ActivePerl offerings which were quite faultless but now seem to have a very limiting or restrictive perl use in XAMPP - there are many issues in previous post relating to these liter addons.

I suggest dispensing with the current batch of perl addons and instead install the latest ActivePerl release via a zip archive file - ActivePerl-5.10.0.1004-MSWin32-x86-287188.zip
It can be placed in the xampp\perl location or in another location on your hard drive and simply edit the shebang in your scripts to point to the location of the perl.exe file.

You can download it from here:
http://downloads.activestate.com/ActivePerl/Windows/5.10/

It contains the more useful PPM.bat file Perl Packet Manager.

Their community forums are available and quite useful.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've used ActiveState Perl for several years so I'm a big fan of PPM. However, I'm starting some development that will be targeted on a mod_perl installation so I really wanted that in place to minimise the differences.

Now that I've sorted out the CPAN problem the xampp Perl seems to be running just fine. What sorts of problems do you think I might run into that I would avoid by switching to ActivePerl?

(Note to other readers: Please resist the urge to tell me to develop on a Linux box rather than a Windows machine - I've already got one, but it needs a memory upgrade before it's usable!)

kbro wrote:I've used ActiveState Perl for several years so I'm a big fan of PPM. However, I'm starting some development that will be targeted on a mod_perl installation so I really wanted that in place to minimise the differences.

mod_perl is now available as a PPM file.
You may or may not be familiar with the following so I post it for those readers who may not be familiar with it.

http://search.cpan.org/~stas/DocSet-0.19/examples/site/src/download/binaries.pod
Item Win32 Active Perl (or the beta if you are game) will detail how to install using your favored PPM.

And here for more mod_perl installation info using PPM:
http://modperlbook.org/html/2-4-1-Installing-mod_perl-with-the-Perl-Package-Manager.html

More mod_perl info here:
http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/os/win32/install.html

kbro wrote:What sorts of problems do you think I might run into that I would avoid by switching to ActivePerl?

In earlier addons with a pl1 or pl2 in the addon name there were a some issues that came to light and installing the full addon minus the pl# in the name seemed to fix the issues or as some did install the full ActivePerl manually.

I am hoping that the latest addon will have no issues but if you come across any would you be so kind as to inform the forum so the issues can be replicated and perhaps addressed by the developers of the addon.

kbro wrote:(Note to other readers: Please resist the urge to tell me to develop on a Linux box rather than a Windows machine - I've already got one, but it needs a memory upgrade before it's usable!)

This is an XAMPP For Windows forum so I would not expect such comments in here.

Hi Izzy,

are you suggesting to not use perl addon for xampp and instead use full active perlsetup??
can please advise that would it work for bugzilla also??

Thanks,
Shubz