As of today, manitou-mdx is available as a package for Ubuntu 9/10 and Debian stable (lenny). Also, a slight change in how it’s installed makes it more portable across different Debian/Ubuntu releases. Until now, I used

perl Makefile.PL DESTDIR='' PREFIX=/usr

to create the Makefile. When using this command, the *.pm files typically get installed into /usr/share/perl/5.x.y/Manitou, a directory that is specific to Perl’s minor version. Since major releases of Debian or Ubuntu tend to come with an upgraded version of Perl, it followed that a manitou-mdx package for Debian Etch couldn’t be used for Debian Lenny, or any current Ubuntu release.

As explained in this use perl; answer, packagers of Perl programs should generate their Makefiles with:

perl Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=vendor

When so doing, manitou-mdx library files get installed into /usr/share/perl5/Manitou, a location that stays the same across Linux distro releases. So hopefully the .deb for manitou-mdx available since today should work with debian etch, lenny and the current ubuntu versions 9.x and 10.x.