Always make sure you are using the recommended version of everything - including Perl. Below is a message sent out from Nick wherein he collected significant linux mail, mine included. Should be all you need to know. I don't know about ELF, but people say its wonderful. But as I say below, I don't use it, and once I did the updates I list out, everything built without a hitch.
Hassle here is all the demos etc.
Use ELF, either distributed that way, or by building yourself. A shared library doesn't seem to be enough, because I got lots of undefined symbols when I tried to run anything. After I added static libX11.a to my system I could make and run it out of the box. Here's part of my Tk.bs. Please correct me if I overlooked something, or got something wrong.