OSF's 'make' has problems with the Makefiles constructed by MakeMaker before MakeMaker-4.18 make just says: `Makefile' is up to date. Using GNU make solves this. Otherwise type: make all and do 'install' by hand: make all perl ./basic_demo cp -r blib /usr/local/lib/perl5 Note that the cp -r does *not* do quite the same as a make install, in particular the binaries are not separated from the scripts. On Alpha if you get something like: GC already registered in Tk_GetGC Tcl_Panic at ... Then it has been reported that reducing optimize from -O4 to -O3 fixes the problem.