Right, I've got an old PC that I used as a mail server for a bit. It's barely running W2K on it.

Before I left the house this morning I kicked off a download of Fedora to install on it - mainly to have a play and see what all the fuss is about with this Linux lark.

So, once I've installed it, what can I do with it? Anything good or useful?

Moon Buggy?

Well seriously, apart from the latest fast paced action games... here are some ideas:

• Router/Firewall - Basically, this way you've got full control over things like traffic prioritisation, rate limiting and the like. With a little fiddling you can still read webpages when your housemate has his Bittorrent going, for example.
  
• Fileserver - Its surprisingly trivial to set up RAID, and it makes a nice place to keep your photos, music, movies, and things. Share your music to iTunes with mt-daapd, watch your videos on a slightly hacked Xbox and store your documents centrally with Samba. Use SCP to get your files when you're out.
  
• Kai - Run a Xlink Kai gateway. Play games over the 'net with a PSP, Xbox (without Live), Xbox360 (without Live), PS2, or Gamecube! (OK, you don't actually need Linux for this - it works on Windows too - but that is not as cool )
  
• Asterisk - Get your PC to answer the phone when you're out, take a message and email it to you. *Note, requires muchos patience and determination to get working*.
  
• About a zillion other things....
  

Hmm

[list]

My adsl router is already acting as a hardware firewall, and my housemate is my wife - she only uses the PC to play The Sims 2

Already have multiple hard drives in my main PC running XP for that sort of stuff

I don't have any games consoles

I have an answering machine already

Thanks for the ideas though

Surf the net without picking up any spyware / adware.
Virus-irrelevant email.