Pipes and sockets are not the same thing. Pipes are fast and reliable, because they are implemented in memory on a single host where both communicating processes run. Sockets are slower and less reliable, but are much more flexible since they allow communication between processes on different hosts. See perlipc for a crash course on using them in perl.

On Linux, pick a distro (inviting no distro wars here!) that some friend uses and copy the cd's, or if you have a fast connection download the iso images from a mirror. http://kernel.org is the original source.

After Compline,
Zaxo