Perl 6 will be the language's first major revision since the early '90s. Here's a preview of some of its great new features.

Join the author of Parrot, Perl 6's new virtual machine, for a hands-on, guided tour of an engine that will eventually let you use C#, Java, Ruby, Perl, and other languages in a single application.

Eclipse is an open source platform for building development tools and even entire applications. Put on your sunglasses -- with wide industry support, Eclipse's future is very bright.

I've just returned from Linux World in New York, and besides a mild case of jet lag and frostbite, I'm back in the swing of things, trying to herd 50,000 words into something resembling a magazine. (Drop me a line and rate my wrangling skills.) And, in addition to recovering from my trip to the Big City, I'm also trying to form an opinion on this most recent Linux World. Everyone asks, "How was the show?" and, to be honest, I'm not sure what to say.

This month's installment of "Do It Yourself" switches gears a bit. Rather than focus on an application, this month's column looks at a development library called the Spread Toolkit, a powerful network communication system. Spread isn't a new project. It's existed in one form or another for roughly five years. Strangely, during all that time, it hasn't received the attention it deserves.

With over two million downloads in 2002, JBoss is arguably the de facto standard for deploying Java-based Web applications. With its advanced features, microkernel architecture, full implementation of the J2EE stack, and an unbeatable price (it's free, available as source code released under the Lesser Gnu Public License), JBoss -- like Linux and Apache -- has been widely adopted by developers and corporate IT departments.

Imagine this scenario: you have twenty servers under your care, some running Red Hat Linux, some running Solaris, and a few machines running Debian. You want to make sure that all of the systems have the same network configuration, but you don't want to log in to each machine and make the changes by hand. Unfortunately, you also know that it won't be easy to write a simple shell script to automate the task because each system's layout is a little bit different. Making simple changes to all machines on your network, without automation, can be quite a hassle. Happily, that's what Cfengine is for.

Last month's column (available online at http://www.linux-mag.com/2003-03/power_01.html) presented a number of ways to transfer files by hand with ssh and scp and the power of the shell. This month's column looks at ways to transfer and synchronize sets of files automatically with ftp, sftp, and wget. Along the way, you'll also see tips on compressed ssh and detached processes. Let's dig in!

Most programs written for distributed memory, parallel computers, including Beowulf clusters, utilize the Message Passing Interface (MPI) or Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) programming interfaces to exchange data or messages among processes. In the past, this column has presented many of the fundamentals of message passing and has shown a number of programming examples using both MPI and PVM. Last month's column focused on the master/slave model of parallelism using MPI, and introduced the MPI_Probe() routine. This month, let's discuss another advanced feature of MPI: how to use derived data types.

PHP is an excellent language for building Web applications. PHP's syntax is likely to be familiar to anyone who's programmed in C/C++ or Perl, and PHP integrates with literally hundreds of third party libraries, providing access to everything from IMAP and MySQL to GD for image manipulation and SNMP for monitoring network devices.

During his television and writing career, Art Linkletter perfected the art of eliciting unexpected and humorous responses from children. For example, when asked how his parents met, one eight-year-old boy replied, "My father was doing some strange chores for my mother. They won't tell me what kind." Indeed, as Linkletter said, "Kids say the darndest things!"

Even though the Web is roughly a decade old and there are now many options for developing Web applications, Perl is still regarded by many as "the darling language of Web programming." Perl's text-wrangling abilities still exceed that of any other popular open source language, and a wealth of Perl modules (from the core distribution and the CPAN) makes Web applications a snap to construct and maintain.

Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org, pronounced "k-nop-iks") is a CD-ROM-based Linux distribution. What's Knoppix good for? Lots of things, including running a firewall, recovering from a system disaster, building product demos, or just keeping Linux with you wherever you go. If your computer can boot from a CD, you can drop Knoppix into the drive, power up, and get an instant Linux fix. (See the sidebar "Knoppix System Requirements" for minimum system requirements.)

LindowsOS 3.0: Too Diluted

Walmart.com $199 PC

As I write this, Red Hat has just gone into the black with a small profit of $300,000 on total revenue of $24.3 million. That makes Red Hat, by my count, the first Linux company to actually make money. The secret to their success? Red Hat Advanced Server (RHAS).