Perl in Windows XP for script testing, advice?

[#1]

I know I've asked this before, wondered who else had Perl set up locally for testing, and if so what version did they use? I live in hope that somewhere there's a version that does everything that Perl on a Linux box can do 🙂
I'm using Indigoperl currently and using Visual C++ Express as a "build environment" but its frustrating when a module just won't install. I'm using Indigo for the convenience of getting a preconfigured Apache environment but its got limitations.
I've used Active Perl in the past, can't remember why I stopped but I think I switched to get the web server function.
Strawberry Perl looks promising, it comes with an environment configured so CPAN works out of the box, but no webserver and no GD.
Things I'm looking for:
1: Full GD support, this appears difficult in Win32 and probably needs some heavy tweaking. I get the impression Active Perl may include a working GD binary, so I'm thinking if going back to Active. I was unable to install GD through CPAN on either Indigo or Strawberry. The install seems to depend on some shell "magic" that doesn't happen in Windows, added to which the windows GD dll is renamed to avoid conflict wheres I think the perl module looks for a library called "GD".
2: DBI + DBD::mysql, not sure if this ought to be easier but I'm hitting a wall here, under Indigo and VC++9 the DBI module won't test (though fortunately there's one already installed) and the DBD::mysql module won't even build, and seems to require administrator access to a database in order to run its tests.
3: A webserver for testing, or maybe I've just got to learn to configure one myself?
4: Some kind of fudge so that files that begin with #!/usr/bin/perl work in Windows without having to strip the /usr/bin.

[#2]

Hello there oliverb,
Sounds like you need... *Drum Roll* Cygwin
Hate to say this but...
Win32: Apache/IIS, PHP and MySQL - is one thing which crosses my mind when I read your Specification...
Otherwise, I'm in the dark with Perl...
I hear ActivePerl should do the job, no?
Perl - GD2
Perl - GD2 Synopsis
In which case,
Win32: Apache, ActivePerl. MySQL?
Hope that helps...
Jim,

[#3]

You're probably right about ActivePerl. I'm just nervous of getting the bits of a Win32 Apache setup to hang together.
So far the win32 Perl versions I know of are:
Active, supposed to have a very good binary library but when I first tried it I couldn't work the package manager.
Indigo, comes with Apache so you get a working webserver with CGI "out of the box". Limited binary packages, functional package manager. No GD.
Strawberry, comes with a version of gnu c++ so it can build and install most CPAN modules. Still no GD though.

Anyway if things had turned out differently I probably would have learned PHP instead of Perl. It just happened that I needed a scripting language and a Perl textbook turned up cheap.
The grief makes dual-booting Ubuntu a seriously attractive option, the install "magic" in a good Linux distro is amazing at times.

[#4]

I once (quite a few years back) downloaded a "Windows version" of Apache and installed a free port of X-windows (I think it was required for some reason).
This didn't involve any compiling and I set up Apache - initially only loop-back address via 127.0.0.1 was allowed by me.
I could use Netscape to browse pages stored on the hard disk.
I think this was Windows 3.1 or Windows NT.

[#5]

Thanks for the tip, its probably what I should have done all along.
Not sure how anything else is going to go but with the Win32 Apache and ActivePerl the cgi-bin folder works "out of the box" and the version of ActivePerl includes a working GD so that covers most things except package installation, which I haven't got to yet.