I have been working with computers for a long time and have yet to see the error message "did not work" yet people persist in saying that is what happened when they ran a program. Programmers go to great lengths to report useful error messages and it is pointless to ignore them. Something happened -- maybe the program succeeded but installed the modules in the wrong place, for example, but I'm willing to bet that nothing printed "did not work" on the screen.
Most likely you were running the wrong perl version when you tried to install the bundles from CPAN, or your 5.12.3 version is installed incorrectly. In any case, what should work is:
Code:
<path to perl>/perl -MCPAN -e"install foo"
should install foo for the version of perl in
<path to perl> provided that you built that perl with the config set up properly to point to that path so that perl can find its files.