Wow, I think I just found the best tip EVER.

I had to install a perl module (WWW::Mechanize) and was stuck in a serious dispute with CPAN over dependencies.  Wow, what a mess.

Fortunately I found this post by David Yin about how to use Debian’s totally awesome apt-get command to install the module.

Steps:

1.  Search the apt-get cache to find the package name of the module.

eddie@yoakam# sudo apt-cache search perl WWW::Mechanize
libwww-mechanize-shell-perl – An interactive shell for WWW::Mechanize

2.   Once found, install the module using apt-get.

eddie@yoakam# sudo apt-get install libwww-mechanize-shell-perl

Presto – this simple trick took just 30 seconds to accomplish what I’d just spent half an hour trying to get CPAN to do.