Hi all. I used to program Perl at work on a Linux box, but it's been a while, and it was on machines that were already setup by sys-admins. Now I'm trying to set up a Linux/Perl environment at home and having a couple of problems.

Firstly, I can't find the 'make' command. I'm trying to install perl modules, so I'm following the standard command line install procedure (gzip / tar / Makefile.pl etc) and when I get to typing the 'make' command I get 'command not found'.

The machine I am using is an Acer Aspire One Netbook, which came pre-installed with Linux (Linpus Linux Lite) and contains Perl v 5.8.8. It's on the 'bash' shell.

Why can't I find 'make'? Surely that is a standard shell command. I've looked in all the usual linux directories (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin etc). Also, I'm not root, as the terminal opens up as user 'user', but as far as I know we were not given a root password.

Any suggestions appreciated!

Linpus Lite is a small distro and it could lack a lot of things programmers need. You may need to install it via your package manager.

That's interesting, I thought that may be the case.

I presume I could start from scratch and install a more complete version of Linux from scratch? That would serve my needs better in the long run.

If so, could I ask what version/distribution you would recommend? I'm looking for something I can download which is preferably free. I need a basic 'windows' style interface, as my gf uses it for basic office stuff (Open Office) and general browsing. All I will be using is the terminal for Perl and basic shell stuff.

Many thanks.