princepawn - BSD is a bit behind, but OpenBSD 2.7 will upgrade and include Perl 5.6... according to
cpan - ports I'm doing something similar to you
Maclair, but I've been playing with FreeBSD - the server has a firewall/DNS/sendmail/apache. It's pretty much perfect for what I'm doing. But, since you asked about linux distrib - I'd listen to the monks above. My own experiences with linux have been limited to RH.
p.s. if you are interested in BSD (FreeBSD for that matter) - check out FreeBSD.org and The FreeBSD Diary - both are excellent resources. 
