Is perl part of the RH8 distro?
how can I tell if its installed? I do not see it in /usr/bin.

yes, it's part of every distro.

rpm -qa | grep perl

if you don't see a decent one there, install it from your distro cd's.

apparently its installed, I just did which perl and it says /usr/bin/perl
I installed some modules for a package but the package still says they are not installed.

I just browsed that dir and there are 2 perl files
/usr/bin/perl
and
/usr/bin/perl5.8.0
should I delete one and reinstall the modules?

no, tehy will be the same file. if rpm says it's installed then it is. tell us what is giving you a problem and it shoudl be pretty obvious what's up

mmk I installed cpan bundle:Interchangekitchensink.
I checked in webmin and it shows kitchensink is installed.
When I try to run interchange.rpm it says the modules are not installed.
do I need to rpm -ihv --nodeps package-yada.yada.rpm

Did you install this set of PERL modules as RPM files or as regular PERL modules the PERL way? If they're installed as RPMs then RPM will probably know about the dependencies and complain if something isn't installed and be correct. I suspect RPM will not make proper assumptions about missing dependencies if you installed modules via PERL itself however... If you know they're installed then go ahead and add --nodeps and see if everything works. I assume you're installing InterChange which I've messed with in the past and is a pretty nice OSS E-Commerce package...

http://www.icdevgroup.org