How to install and set up Strawberry Perl

I don't believe that any of the gnuwin32 utilities are necessary for Strawberry. I installed it on a Windows VM that had cygwin installed but Strawberry isn't using it. I suspect numberwhun just likes having all the external helper items complete in his/her CPAN config :)

It shouldn't need gnuwin32. The way the article reads, it sounds like the author figured out what tools he'd need for a CPAN on unix and installed them first.

When I wrote the article on installing Strawberry Perl, it was done with the information that I had gathered. The version that the article is using is the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 release. When I first downloaded it, I installed it and immediately ran CPAN to install the Bundle::CPAN module. I was immediately presented with the typical CPAN setup questions which I simply stepped through and took all the defaults to see what would happen. When trying to do that I received a number of failures. (I don't remember at this time what they were) I decided to go ahead and gather and install the utilities that it was looking for during the CPAN setup. I figured it couldn't hurt. So, after doing so, I re-initiated the CPAN setup and afterwards again tried to do the Bundle::CPAN installation: voila, it worked. That is the reason I installed the tools. If you read the update that Jeremy (the person who mentioned all the tools are not needed) replied with yesterday, he mentions that he was referring to the 5.10 release and not the 5.8.8 Alpha 2 release. I did download and start to play with the new release and have already noticed a number of changes to it already, including CPAN itself. I have updated the article to reflect the version of Strawberry Perl that it is for for those reading it. I hope that this clears up any confusion over the different versions and the article.