MacLochlainns Weblog

I actively maintain virtual test instances for my writing and teaching on Windows 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and Solaris. Perl on Windows is always interesting. I use ActivePerl on Windows 7 rather than Strawberry Perl, and it was interesting to see this note after I upgraded to the most current Community Edition of ActivePerl (5.16.3).

I thought it might be kind to post ActiveState’s Release Note because you should really read it before you try to install ActivePerl on Windows 7/8. Just make sure you’ve removed any earlier version of ActivePerl before trying the install. That’s what I did, and surprise, there weren’t any problems.

While the installation doesn’t tell you that you need to restart the Windows 7 operating system, you do. If you don’t restart Windows 7 after the ActivePerl install, you’ll get the following error message:

install_driver(mysql) failed: Can't locate DBD/mysql.pm in @INC

You can grab the DBD::MySQL bundle with this command:

perl -MCPAN -e install Bundle::DBD::mysql

It downloads the MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) C/C++ compiler, but it’ll be nested and not conflict with one if you have installed it independently. Absence of the compiler means you can’t attempt to build the library.

Proceeding further, I discovered a number of incompatibilities. The basic commands require you to load CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) shell:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

Inside the Perl CPAN shell:

cpan> force install DBD:mysql --mysql_config C:\ProgramData\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6

You also need to create a MySQL anonymous user in the database to support the default user during compilation, and if you dropped the test database you need to recreate it. I also ended up creating an ODBC user. Here are the commands to run as the root superuser:

CREATE USER 'ODBC'@'localhost';
CREATE USER ''@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 's3krit';
GRANT ALL ON test.* TO ''@'localhost';

I also took the time to update the MySQL test.pl to Perl 5.16; unfortunately, at the end of the day I didn’t get it working. Maybe I’ll try back in a few weeks. You need to change line 57 from port 5050 to port 3306, and “SharedSecret” to “s3krit“, as shown:

Here’s are the edits required test.pl program on lines 189 and 194:

The only release note provided is below, which I found inadequate. If you find the trick before me, please post it.

Windows

• The fork() emulation has known limitations. See perlfork for a detailed summary. In particular, fork() emulation will not work correctly with extensions that are either not thread-safe, or maintain internal state that cannot be cloned in the pseudo-child process. This caveat currently applies to extensions such as Tk and Storable.
• It seems that some people are having problems with the ActivePerl MSI installer. The first thing to note is that you CANNOT install ActivePerl 5.16 over an older version of ActivePerl based on 5.14, 5.12, 5.10, 5.8, 5.6 or 5.005, such as build 1204 or any other 1200, 1000, 800, 600 or 500 series build. We have determined that some of these problems are due to other installations of Perl that may be pointed at by something in the environment.

  The sure-fire solution is to make absolutely certain that no other installations of Perl are on the target machine. Realizing that this is not always possible, you can follow these steps to ensure the other installations will not interfere.

  • Stop the “Windows Installer” service. This can be accomplished from the command prompt using the following command:

    C:\> net stop "Windows Installer"

    C:\> net stop "Windows Installer"

  • Temporarily remove or rename PERLLIB and PERL5LIB environment variables in the system environment.
  • Temporarily remove or rename the following registry values:

    [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] lib = <directory> (REG_SV) [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] sitelib = <directory> (REG_SV) [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] lib-<PerlVersion> = <directory> (REG_SV) [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] sitelib-<PerlVersion> = <directory>(REG_SV)

    [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] lib = <directory> (REG_SV) [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] sitelib = <directory> (REG_SV) [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] lib-<PerlVersion> = <directory> (REG_SV) [\\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Perl] sitelib-<PerlVersion> = <directory>(REG_SV)

  • Proceed with the installation.

  Once the installation has completed successfully, the above actions may be undone although restoring the environment variables or the registry values may interfere with the proper operation of your new ActivePerl installation. In order to perform all of the above steps, you will need to have Administrative privileges on the target machine. If you do not have the required privileges you should contact your Administrator.