Thanks Mattail!!!

I used your instructions above to install a local version of aspell in my account and then I was able to install Text::Aspell and get the SpellChecker plugin for HTMLArea working. For anyone else, here is how I did it:

First, install aspell as Matttail did above.

The SpellChecker plugin requires the Text::Aspell perl module. You can install this plugin in the SpellChecker directory itself since perl will always search for installed modules locally in the directory where a given .cgi script is run. In this case, when the plugin calls the spell-check-logic.cgi script, it will check the same directory for a folder called Text which contains Aspell.pm. Use these commands:

cd /path/to/htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker
wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/H/HA/HANK/Text-Aspell-0.05.tar.gz
tar -xzf Text-Aspell-0.05.tar.gz
cd Text-Aspell-0.05
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/path/to/htmlarea/plugins/SpellChecker \
CCFLAGS=-I$HOME/usr/include \
LIBS="-L$HOME/usr/lib -laspell"
LD_RUN_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib make
make test
make install
# need to copy installed module into SpellChecker directory
cp -r lib/perl/5.8.4/* .

Following these steps will put Text/Aspell.pm in your SpellChecker directory and allow the plugin to work correctly.

Cheers,
Morgan