Just a stab in the dark, what version of Subversion do you have on that box? It looks like this perl module comes bundles with Subversion 1.4 and some users have complained that it doesn't first check to see if there is a subverison installed for it to use. It also looks like that module was last updated in 2007.
So perhaps it isn't good for production use :-( If you really do need SVN::Core working, you might need to compile it from source and not use a distro. I haven't used that module myself though and am not even sure that is the issue. Depending on your needs, this may work- http://search.cpan.org/~karman/SVN-Class-0.16/lib/SVN/Class.pm SVN::Class uses your svn binary to reduce dependencies. It was last updated a couple months ago, and looks like it has a clean syntax. -y