Wasn't as hard as I expected it to be. Managed to download SDK to a windows box, unpack .msi and then copy the .pm files to a linux box. Tweaked the sample a bit and got this to work:
print $swis->QueryXml('SELECT Name,StatusDescription FROM Orion.SEUM.Transactions');
print $swis->QueryXml('SELECT Name FROM Orion.SEUM.Transactions WHERE Unmanaged=1');
Seems to be giving me what I need and much faster/elegant than sending out alerts every minute to a cgi script.
Thanks.