IP Phone info ??

You can use something like asterisk for a home pbx that will work with Cisco phones...but if you want a true 'Cisco' phone system, you would need to buy a call manager box, which I think is an appliance these days, but I could be wrong (been a few years). The callmanager box (or software if you can install separately) will be quite costly. Asterisk is a great alternative, and I recommend trixbox (trixbox.org). Trixbox is a image based linux distro with asterisk and a bunch of tools already installed....works great. Works with tons of IP phones, although if you are using a Cisco 79xx, you'll need to flash the image and install a open source SIP image, which is available via their website for free if you have a CCO account. Hope this helps.

The easier solution is to setup Call Manager Express on a cisco router that supports it (note that this will require a fairly recent router, almost maxed out on flash and DRAM as it is).

You'll also need some voice gateway hardware for said router, or another voice gateway. And some phones. Unity Express is nice, but you don't tend to find those too much used.

Some people have setup full Call Manager on vmware sessions, but its more complex. That runs under Windows (or embedded linux on 5.x) but only on very specific hardware configurations with very demanding and specific exact hardware matches.

People do sell complete CCME labs on eBay, although its not hard to get together.

There's the cisco-voip mailling list..