Slightly off topic, but for anyone who's interested in the whole "run your own Asterisk server" approach... the easiest way to go about it is to grab a copy of AsteriskNOW (liveCD and installable). Basically it's Asterisk designed to be user friendly... you can get a full switch up and running from nothing in about 15-20 minutes depending on the speed of the machine you're installing on. It comes with a web-based GUI to manage extensions, dialplan options,etc.

If you want to use it just for video chat between friends/etc you don't even need to worry about sip providers and things, just add a few extensions that use SIP as the protocol, and make sure that the H263 codec is enabled for them. I haven't used the gui in a while, but if the option for this isn't in the GUI it's extremely easy to add to the config file:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+video

It's by no means intended to be easy for complete new comers to technology as the thread initially talks about, but if you want to try something new and neat you don't need a lot of Linux experience or anything to get it going!

Oh, one last tip... I don't know if the gui has the option, but for me I found it was important to enable NAT support since I'm behind a NAT router:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+sip+nat
(it's as easy as adding nat=yes to your extension definitions).

Thanks,
-Rob