Red Hat, CPAN, and Intense, Throbbing Pain
Hey kids…
just in case you ever find yourself admin of a Red Hat 9 server, you might want to make a note of this, just so you don’t spend HOURS OF YOUR TIME DIGGING THROUGH USENET LOOKING FOR THE ANSWER LIKE I DID.
Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that you wanted to install some Perl modules on your server. The easiest way to do that is to use CPAN.pm or its successor, CPANPLUS, both of which provide a nice shell interface to the CPAN module repository. However, after a while you will notice that some modules just won’t install properly, no matter what you do. (If you’re like me, you’ll find that you can’t even make CPANPLUS to begin with.)
The issue turns out to be that Red Hat has set the LANG environment variable to UTF-8 by default, which seems to bork something serious within Perl. So, just issue the following command from the shell:
unset LANG
… and now all your modules will install without a hitch.
Easy, huh? Sure would be nice if anybody DOCUMENTED IT ANYWHERE! (He said, looking around for a sharp object or large-caliber firearm.)
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Comments
Workbench
May 16, 2004
5:48 pm
Routing around the documentation
As I bring a new server online with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I’m reminded again that it would be impossible to use this operating system without weblogs, Google, and Google Groups.
Unbeknownst to Me
May 27, 2004
7:59 am
Hey! Self-signed SSL Certificates for IMAP Can Be Added to the Keychain in 10.3.3!
I’ve had a problem with OS X’s Mail.app popping up an “Unable to verify certificate–do you want to proceed anyway?” message every time I open it and it connects to our company’s SSL-encrypted IMAP authentication with a self-signed certificate. It…
Rhesa
November 24, 2004
12:22 pm
Excellent! It took me 2 days of agonizing over the stupidity of RH9 before I found your post.
You saved precious years of my life 🙂