ah work that a mortal like myself could overcome? I just bought a beginning perl book (oreilly press) and it covers perl 5.10 and I really just want to be able to work with the examples in the book...

ability to run updated versions of perl and python will probably be the deciding factor in this purchase. I do get that I could learn on the older versions, but linux = choice and I think on real linux I should have the choice for a newer version right? so how hard on the debian chroot install?