A major problem with the officially distributed version of Perl on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has led to a firestorm of complaints among developers. The problem, which also manifests itself on some versions of the Fedora and CentOS Linux distributions, means that some programs will take more than 100 (yes, one hundred) times longer to execute under Red Hat than other distributions. A Red Hat engineer has indicated that it will fix the problem in its next release (i.e., Red Hat Enterprise 5.3), but has not said when that update will arrive.

Webinars and webcasts on all kinds of technology topics have exploded in recent years, and the good news is lots of the best ones are free. All you need is a browser to attend them, and most of them stay archived online for long periods of time. For open sourcers, there are both ongoing webcasts on cutting-edge open source topics that you can attend on a regular basis, and previously produced ones that may be of interest. Here is a collection of both upcoming and archived ones that could be of interest to you.

When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog "planets" come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.