I'm quite interested in resusing an old bondi iMac i have as a unix box, and i was wondering what distro people would recomend.
I had thought of using BSD/FreeBSD cos thats what osx is based on. I'm doing this as a teaching excercise (for myself) so i'm looking for something achievable rather than massivly overcomplicated.
Any advice would be very welcome
ora
Hi,
What's the processor you have on that iMAC ? I think OS X is the best choice...
If you want other BSD, try NetBSD http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/macppc
Cheers jsilva. 
Its a 233mhz G3 (bondi coloured RevB imac) with fairly little ram, so i kinda doubt osx will run properly. I even heard that apple were giving refunds for people who bought osx to run on a G3.
I checked out NetBSD ppc, and that says it does support bondi iMacs, so i may well go for that. I have been checking out the unix/bsd bit of osx on my powerbook, but i get the impression that installing a distro is an education in itself, so i wanted to try it. I aim to set up a small network with my pb, an old G4 400 (for big downloads via broadband) and the imac running unix.
Thanks for the advice
ora
Hi ora,
You're right, forget about OS X... my advice is, at least, 300 Mhz and 256 MB of memory for OS X... try NetBSD, if you're looking for a "new OS experience", I guess you'll like it !
good luck !
Once again, thank you jsilva.
It's amazing how the people around here, and unix people in general, are so friendly and helpful. As new communities go, i haven't found one this welcoming since i got into the apple acene years ago with my nifty performa 630!
And not only that, unix rocks, and osx being based on it is the bravest/best step apple could have made.
Many happy (if brain taxing) times to come....
[me]smiling broadly[/me]
ora 
Mandrake has a ppc version of linux that should run on the G3. I've used it with success on some AIX systems.
http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=29
Cheers,
Yellow Dog linux
native support to resurect old macs w/linux
use google
good luck
that's true , Yellow dog Linux or Slackintosh (slackware version for PPC) they are the better choice for G3 processor , Apple OS 10.3 it is improved regarding OS 10.2 but not enough for a normal usage 
Here's how to get into the Butterzone...
Try Gentoo Linux you only compile stuff that you need for your specific machine (i.e G3) then none of the extra: Alvitec VE gets thrown into the Kernel
But this is for guys with alot of time on their hands and want a small speed difference for each calc.
Anyway OS X 10.3 won't run well on a 233MHz iMac, it won't even run on my Beige G3 300MHz/1MB with 768MB RAM!
If not than here's the alternate:
YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) is great (im using it now). It has a good graphical installer, too. But if you want something to do on a rainy day (or just bored out of your mind) try installing Gentoo. If you don't feel like installing for a while, try one of those floppy distros ;).