Installer Conundrum

I recently read about and started fooling around with DB:: DataObject. I installed it on one of my machines at home(Apache running on Win2K) using the installer/package manager. I remember that I had some issue with the fact that it is dependant on Validate which is an alpha package. I don't remember how I resolved that, it was about a month ago. Both packages are installed on that machine now & working fine. This week, I've set up the pear installer package manager on a couple more machines (1 Win2K 1 Linux RH9). When I try to install DB::DataObject, it fails because it is dependant on Validate. When I go to install Validate, I can't find it anywhere in the package list. This is presumably because it is an alpha package. So, I went to the configuration page of the package manager and set the Preferred Package State: to alpha instead of stable. When I go back to the package management page, I get the following error message: Error pear-database.php:536: Notice: Undefined index: Crypt_RC4 It does this on both the Linux and Win2K boxes which are running different Apache & php versions. Also I can't find any file on my system named pear-database.php so I suspect this a configuration problem on the pear servers. Am I right? -Colin PS... It seems strange that a package can be 'stable', yet dependant on a package whose state is 'alpha'.