To address your questions, I’ll get them in a different order:
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Static Address. This is preferred, but not vital, and usually costs more from your ISP. We’ll ignore it for now. As long as you can get on the web… you’re good. As our friend above said, no, you cannot make some up. Just accept what you receive from your ISP. That’ll work just fine.
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Name Servers. Can you browse to sites like ‘www.yahoo.com’, ‘www.opensuse.org’, and ‘www.mozilla.com’? Yes? Hooray, you’ve got a working nameserver setup. (whew!)
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Default Gateway. Uh… if you’re able to GET to the internet… your default gateway is working great.
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Hostname. No, you don’t NEED one, but they’re awfully handy. But that’s where having a static (non-changing) IP address would be handy, since it would always be the same. Of course, that’s why places have names… The names are looked up in a big database (figuratively, don’t flame me!) and used to resolve where something is, since the internet is really run by numbers.
There ARE some caveats to running your own server out of your home, but everything has caveats… and you’ll never learn until you try, and trying at home is cheaper, safer and a whole lot more fun.
You’ll need a web server of course, Apache2, lighthttpd, well, there’s a few. I like apache2, but I’ve been using it a while. Do you want pages built with perl? php? ruby? YaST is your friend, click to install apache, then using the webserver config tool in ‘network services’ (yast), choose which languages you want to use. Yast will even then install the modules you need to support those languages. Experience will help you determine exactly what you need. But you have to start somewhere right?
Now, to make things neat, and so your friends can view your very own “My First Webpage™” (Hey! No snickering! I had them!), you can get yourself a free domain name.
(shameless plug)
I use Dyndns.com as my domain service, good service, good prices… AND they offer FREE domains. (didn’t want you to run away because you thought it would be costing money!)
Go there, register with them (FREE!!), register for a domain, like (cabofixe.homeip.net or something), and voila!! (it’s automatically set to your current IP when you set it up)
Of course, you’ll want to run a small program (ezipaddr or something) to automatically update your domain/ip address if yours was to change at some point (dynamic address, most common with ISP’s) Dyndns has how-to’s for that, but worst case, visit dyndns once a day and reset the ip address to your current one… that’ll work for short term until you learn more and are more comfortable.
Then you begin putting stuff into /srv/www/htdocs/ and taaa daaa… a web page!
Ah, a sidenote… if you have a router/firewall between your computer(s) and your dsl/cable modem… GOOD! now you have to open up a port between the outside world and the web-server machine. You’ll need the internal IP address of your web-serving computer (usually something like 192.168.1.x) and the magic port number… 80!
Welcome, and good luck.