If you go to install the Perl module DBD::Mysql on Red Hat 9 with MySQL 3.23 (and probably other versions as well), two gotchas might appear. First, if the MySQL bin directory is not in your path, then you won't be able to have it pull the options automatically. Make sure that when the Makefile.PL runs (either because you're running it or CPAN is) it can find and run mysql_config.
The second gotcha is that Red Hat shipped 9 with default LANG=en_US.UTF-8 in the shell environment. This will cause your makefile to have some oddly malformed lines around line 89, and will cause a blizzard of these complaints:
Unsuccessful stat on filename containing newline at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/ExtUtils/Liblist/Kid.pm line 97.
The solution, according to the kind David Ross at Linuxquestions.org, is to
export LANG=C
before running Makefile.PL. Many thanks.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/62975