Oracle, perl & DBI under debian

[Victor <vdemart@supereva.it>]

Willing to use my laptop as a client of an oracle DB on an NT server
and network, to start with I've just begun to read the book by
Alligator Descartes and Tim Bunce on "Perl & DBI".

Being at my very first steps on this field there's something somewhat
obscure to me and I wonder if someone could answer this easy question
of mine:

To use perl and DBI:oracle do I need to install 

perl and the DBI stuff for oracle from the DBI site only

			OR

perl, the DBI stuff for oracle and A SERVER (PROPRIETARY) CLIENT FOR
ORACLE?

Thanks

Vittorio