I'm looking forward to tomorrow's first meeting of the New York City Perl 6 Beginners Study Group.  In recent days I've been posting on the perl6-users mailing list seeking advice on installing Rakudo Perl 6.  It turns out that there are two different ways of installing Perl 6; you choose one or the other depending on your objective.  Let me describe both.

First, if your objective is to keep up with the "bleading edge" of Perl 6 development or to contribute to the Perl 6 project, you're probably better off using the 'rakudobrew' utility to install the Moar virtual machine and build Perl 6 on top thereof.  You can follow the instructions which appear here:

http://rakudo.org/how-to-get-rakudo/#Installing-Rakudo-Star-Source-Rakudobrew

Second, however, if your objective is to get a usable distribution of Perl 6 and learn or play around with the language, you are better off getting the latest release of the Rakudo Star distribution and building it from source.  There was a new release of Rakudo Star this week reflecting the Perl 6.c specification release.  I did the following (for Linux x86_64):

1. Decided to install Rakudo Star under my home directory:  mkdir -p ${HOMEDIR}/rakudo-star
Downloaded this tarball: http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/rakudo-star-2016.01.tar.gz

2. tar xzvf rakudo-star-2016.01.tar.gz

3. cd rakudo-star-2016.01

4. perl Configure.pl --backend=moar --gen-moar --prefix=${HOMEDIR}/rakudo-star

5. make

6. make rakudo-test

7. make install

8. In .bashrc or equivalent: export PATH=$HOME/rakudo-star/bin:$HOME/rakudo-star/share/perl6/site/bin:$PATH

9. source ~/.bashrc

10. which perl6
/home/jkeenan/rakudo-star/bin/perl6
$ perl6 -v
This is Rakudo version 2016.01.1 built on MoarVM version 2016.01
implementing Perl 6.c.

My hunch is that for the purpose of the study group, the second procedure will work out better.  However, I've actually done both on the same machine.  YMMV.