why is ppm: command not found?

Question

I'm trying to run a few ppm commands, but I'm not getting very far. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS on an azure VM.

> $ sudo apt-get install ppm
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
ppm is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.

> $ ppm repo add ASSP2 "http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/assp/ASSP V2 multithreading/packages/"
No command 'ppm' found, but there are 16 similar ones
ppm: command not found

> $ perl -v

This is perl 5, version 14, subversion 2 (v5.14.2) built for x86_64-linux-gnu-thread-multi
(with 55 registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

Any direction will be very helpful.

FYI: I have figured a work around by using cpan, but I'd rather use ppm

The work around is simply

$ sudo cpan
cpan[#]> install some::package

Answer 1

"ppm" is the name of the package manager used by ActiveState's ActivePerl.

The Ubuntu ppm package is the "Power Policy Manager," a completely unrelated thing.

Unless you are using ActivePerl on your Ubuntu install, you do not want to use their PPM utility. If the package you're trying to install isn't available in Ubuntu's repos, or you don't want to use it if it is available, then using CPAN really is your best bet.