marc, the ppc platform is definitely viable, and can be an adventure if your hardware is really really old. in this situation though, it is provided for you, and quite new. ppc linux has it's ups and downs as much as anything else. however, i have ppc linux and open bsd running on several macs with no real issues when used as servers. debian is no more difficult to install on ppc than on x86, and with the new "debian-installer" you should have little to no difficulty with the install if you are not familiar with it. yellow dog linux is certainly another option for a more RedHat based distro. before i had the cake to get the x86 machines that i love so much (did i say how much i love Xeons?), i had a boatload of mac hardware to install on (my former roomate collected them...200 or so machines all said) and i was able to get YDL and debian, as well as openbsd on to macs ranging from 6500's and 9500's, ANS server, to Blue and White G3s, and of course G4's. for the machine to be tasked as a server, it is my opinion that you leave all software not relevant to the services you need off of the machine. the debate above about the Mac OS is relative to using it as a workstation. There is no way in my experience to run OS X without the GUI. for me, that makes it unacceptable as a server. other people will obviously disagree, but ultimately you must decide. unnecessary services eat up memory and are potentially the source of vulnerabilities. not to mention, i just don't like it. there is another solution however. the darwin OS that the Mac OS is built around is available, gui-less and "free".... if you want the "free" solution, then OSX will not be the way to go as it is only half free. and apart from sshd conf files, I have found it to largely be a futile endeavour to manually edit service config files inside of OS X. you somehow always are forced to use their gui apps to configure the machine, which is irritating...just plain irritating. just to put it out there.. it would be nice to have a recent version of FreeBSD for ppc, however, it isn't really an option atm. for the moment I have to strongly suggest debian/ppc. i have a G4 450 running debian sarge (kernel 2.6.8) that filters mail for viruses and spam and store/forward, and all this for well over 250 domains and 8,000 users. FYI... just $.02 from me. later.
