You've looked at the newest Dell XPS, maybe a spiffy HP Pavillion. You've surfed over to Apple's Web store to drool over the powerful, stylish machines of Steve Jobs.

But there's a problem: You're broke. You just don't have — or shouldn't be spending— the $600 to more than $2,000 you'd have to pay for one of those new digital hotrods.

There's still hope if you have the do-it-yourself daring to combine the free, open-source operating system Ubuntu Linux with an inexpensive used personal computer.

Linux, a community-developed operating system, comes in many flavors, including Red Hat, Yellow Dog and Xandros. The Ubuntu version is one of the most popular among folks seeking computing power for home and office tasks such as word processing, Web browsing and working with spreadsheets. The topic here is Ubuntu, not the dozens of other perfectly wonderful Linux distributions that would be enough for a fat book.

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