Just a quick note about G+ Hangouts, if you want to use a Linux system you need to install it only on a Debian or Fedora based distribution.
I've tried it to chat with an Ubuntu laptop and it works fine, no chanches with Gentoo, Slack, Arch, ... there's just a minimal support to Linux for it, I've seen messages about tests on porting these RPMs on other distros but it seems to be too early to use them without troubles

Back again as many of you, I think it could take a while to restore all previous functionalities, I was just looking at my previous blog posts and I cannot see them yet, I'll wait for a while before reporting it, I guess Dan and other guys from the staff are still working on it.

Here are few suggestions for an home server usage (or at least this is what I do with mine)

- NAS and file sharing across the local LAN (like many folks here): music, photos, videos, films, software, configs and backups

- file sharing with: Samba, FTP, RSync, NFS. I use these services for sharing my files across the lan. Samba and FTP for general file sharing (media centers, computers, ...), NFS for my Solaris and IRIX workstations, RSync when I need to sync documents and my personal wiki documentation between laptops and the server itself.

- Streaming: uPnP with mediatomb, many electronic appliances supports it like TVs (DLNA ready), consoles (PS3, XBox, ...) and cell phones (Android with upnp sw for example)

- audio/video streaming with Icecast. I use it as my internal radio station for streaming MP3 files, with the same method I stream internally few cool webradios on the Net

- lan web server: I've some homemade apps on it, I'm not using Apache but lighttpd, it's faster and my internal workload is pretty low

- home automation software and security. My own apps controlling real hw, sensors, ...

- mail server: if you use procmail+exim you know why I've an internal mail server at home

- download station with torrent, mule, ... for legal file sharing only :-)

- remote control sw (VNC)

- VoIP !!! nobody mentioned it before ! I'm trunking channels with asterisk and I'm using it to reach remote friends

These are my reasons to keep an internal home server, I don't develop web apps or I don't provide site hostings for work, it's just a personal usage but in the same platform I may host personal portals and web apps (with the appropriate bandwidth)

Start with BASH, then move to python

Please consider even these things: ICECAST, SHOUTCAST.
If you plan to integrate all you music media in just one channel you must consider ICECAST as well. It's nice if you'd like to add for example your favorite internet radios or you want to create your own "local radio" for streaming contents across your lan, really useful if you plan to listen it from embedded devices, PDA, smartphones, ...

Thank you so much Matthew, I'll try to use it after a little bit of study (and work obviously...)

GOT IT ! Come on boys, they've just opened it !

Like you, I've tried this morning with the new invitation sent from Matthew but unfortunately it seems they've closed it again

Indeed, I've received your invitation twice so thank you for it but I guess they've locked the site with some sort of user limit

My favorite choice is Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org), originally it was a Java development tool only but it's now my favorite choice for every kind of development, no matter about the language. You need C ? Eclipse+CDT, PHP ? Eclipse+PDT and so on...
You may even do a lot of jobs with other languages, develop web apps, profile them and so forth; cross compiling (for embedded or Windows apps) is supported and heavily used as well, take a look at it if you want a good IDE tool.

Now the bad part: it's huge, fat and slow on cheap/obsolete hw, it eats a lot of RAM and some CPU processing power as well, you cannot use it on old hw but it runs fine on recent machines. If you'd like to use one tool for everything (with proper plugins/extensions) maybe Eclipse could be your best friend (also: platform independent), if you want to keep a smooth approach maybe you'd better look at something else

Ben