I have installed commercial-grade systems, such as those made by ADEMCO, GE, etc. Such systems can beep a Beeper but it is crude because these commercial systems are designed to report via a commercial monitoring center service. Monitoring services can be found selling on the Internet for $10 monthly. You can buy all supplies on eBay. There are several commercial suppliers that sell retail on eBay. A super-cheap alternative is to buy an IP-camera and install it in your apartment. Cheap, $80 Chinese FOSCAM cameras can used as a security system IF you leave high-speed internet running in your apartment while you are away. IP-cameras can be found on eBay (search for FOSCAM). These cameras contain a complete ucLinux system with an internal web server. You can access the camera remotely and, on th PTZ versions, remotely control the pan/tilt to look around the room. These cameras contain security capabilities where you can set it to email you 6 photos (taken a second apart) of whatever tripped its integral motion detector (based on a percentage of pixel change). Also there are external contact closure contacts that you can hook to any external sensor that will cause it to send an email or an email with 6 photos. Finally, there is a set of external contacts that you can use to remotely operate any device that detects a contact closure, such as an electric door lock. For a simple, cheap security system that also gives you photos of the intruder that you can provide the police, a $80+/- IP-camera is a viable choice.

I agree with hairyfeet. I use Linux and Windows and have done so long before Ubuntu was on the Linux scene, pre-X when CLI was all that there was. I found XP to be rock solid and my install never crashed, but then I don't play games, which I suspect is the main source of such crashes. I tested the W7 RC and found it to be solid and easy to use. I believe that the market share percentages for desktops will continue much as they are. Nonetheless, I may not buy W7 due to the price. Instead I'll probably just keep a VM copy of XP for the one program that is extremely important to me yet won't run natively on Linux or in Wine. I love Linux but not because Windows is a bad desktop product.

"ALSA "works" most of the time and even out of the box." isn't my recent experience. Based upon what I have read, ALSA apparently supports the Realtek ALC888S chipset "if" the support chipset is not nVidia. I purchased a very new motherboard with an nVidia support chipset and on-board ALC888S sound. It does makes sound, along with horrible scratching, distortion and reverberation. Others have reported the same experience. I suspect that the problem is deep in the device recognition as DMESG reports "unknown nVidia device" when it reports the audio chipset. I have had similar problems with newer video boards. Of course these all worked perfectly with Windows XP. Having to choose older parts in order to avoid the guess factor on whether a new peripheral or motherboard will work is, to me, a major problem.