With the help of Bryan Henderson who is the maintainer of the CPAN Curses module, this has been resolved. The problem is that the CPAN install process cannot locate the curses system library, so it does not property configure the Makefile that is constructed. The workaround (for the current version 1.39) is the following: `export CURSES_LDFLAGS='' export CURSES_CFLAGS='-lncurses' perl Makefile.PL make LDLOADLIBS=-lncurses make LDLOADLIBS=-lncurses install make LDLOADLIBS=-lncurses cdemo`