A Blue and White G3 will happily boot and run the latest Debian releases (Etch or Lenny). The Beige G3s (which may have slightly lower MHz ratings [233 for Beige vs 300 for the B&W]) will run Sarge OK once booted -- I haven't tried Etch or Lenny, but they need a bit of TLC to get them to boot Linux in the first place. Mail me offline if you decide to give this a try. I'll try to help.
There are even older Macs with sub 200MHz CPUs, but you will probably find them too limited in the amount of RAM they can take.
Rick On Feb 4, 2008, at 2:55 PM, Kelly Harding wrote:
PPC Macs are getting a fair bit cheap these days, and are quite easy to upgrade, the G4s start around 400Mhz though. G3s you can get at around 233Mhz, a Beige G3 with a G3/233mhz cpu should handle linux ok, though they're a bit of a tempermental machine really ime. Blue & White G3s are the better bet really for G3s. As the CPUs are ZIF socketed, you can add faster or slower G3 cpus to them. They'll take a few hard drives too without a problem. Never personally tried Linux on PPC/Mac as I've always found OS X to meet my needs.