Newbie, no experience with voip, need help

[hopefulhype]

I have no experience with setting up phone systems

i was told about asterisk and i want to play around with it

i have a spare computer that i can put any linux os on

i would like to know what else is needed to get a system setup so that i can play around with asterisk

do i need voip phones? or can regular phones work?

please tell me what else i would need

thank you in advance.

[david55]

http://www.asteriskdocs.org/

For pure VoIP you need an ethernet card. You can get software VoIP phones that will work with sound cards, but they generally have flaws compared with dedicated SIP phones.

If you have ordinary phones, you no longer have a pure VoIP system, but you can use them, either with, relatively expensive, telephony cards in the PC, or with outboard VoIP to analogue convertors, known as ATAs (analogue telephone adapters).