I decided go back to Redhat 8 and try linux again, and its been going alright cept that vi doesnt work for some reason.

I keep getting this error message:
# vi
vim: error while loading shared libraries: libperl.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I dont know what this is but I really need vi working, any help would be appreciated.

I don't know what that means too, but I will guess ( that's what I should do if I've got that error message ).
I use Mandrake myself and seems like the libraries libperl were not installed successfuly. Under KDE (note, this is mandrake, but might be a similar way to do in red hat) go into "configuration >> packaging >> install software (it'll open an app called rpmdrake). There, make a search for perl, it will bring a list of all aplications and libraries with perl, you might need to install one(somes) of them. Read the descriptions carefuly.

Another good alternative is to use Midnight Commander. It's pretty similar to Windows Commander made for M$ Win. It includes a good editor which you access by simply pressing F4. Here is the homepage:

http://www.ibiblio.org/mc/

Good luck!!!

Oh yeah If RedHat also uses RPMdrake, simply type rpmdrake in a console

i dont seem to have an rpmdrake, but I checked my package manager, and ticked all the things I could about perl... but when I installed redhat it had an option to see more files to install, but I dont know how to do that again...

also I cant find a libperl.so either, ive tried reinstalling mod_perl and vim etc but still no luck :/

infact im just going to goto filesearching.com and search for the file and put it where its supposted to be, coz i really need vi :P

if you really need vi, why are you trying to run vim?
; )

It looks to me like they are aliased to each other.
How about a:

whereis vi
/path/to/vi

and see if vi can start w/o this perl library.

As for the packaging, try to install the dev perl packages.