I've never hired people just coming from school, but I have interviewed them and not invited them back. The problem they all had: overvaluating their (limited) experience. This wasn't for Perl positions, but running your Linux box at home and running sendmail on it doesn't mean you qualify to admin a forest of computers with different (Unix) operating systems.

Now, I'm not saying you don't have the necessary experience, but be very sure that the experience you have is worthwhile to your potential employer. Don't overestimate what you do in your spare time, or your contributions to open source projects, especially not if that's all you did. After all, that's all voluntairy - you do work on projects you like or have an interest in, and where you can leave at anytime. It doesn't show how you perform on a project you aren't interested in, or what you do if you're pulled from a project you like, and have to do something else.

Abigail