Got My Mac Mini

I may have waited seventeen months, but I bought a used PowerPC G4 Mac Mini through eBay. I'm running the Debian PowerPC port on it. Why? It's so darn simple. Download and burn .iso, boot in Mac Mini. Easy. I couldn't do that with FreeBSD. The only wrinkle I encountered involved trying to manually create the partition table. I repeatedly received an error (which I have since forgot), so I let Debian create the partition for me. Here is what it set up:

macmini:~# df -h 
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              72G  3.9G   65G   6% /
tmpfs                 252M     0  252M   0% /dev/shm
macmini:~# fdisk -l /dev/hda
/dev/hda
        #                    type name                  length   base      ( size )  system
/dev/hda1     Apple_partition_map Apple                     63 @ 1         ( 31.5k)  Partition map
/dev/hda2         Apple_Bootstrap untitled                1954 @ 64        (977.0k)  NewWorld bootblock
/dev/hda3         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 untitled           153281251 @ 2018      ( 73.1G)  Linux native
/dev/hda4         Apple_UNIX_SVR2 swap                 3018219 @ 153283269 (  1.4G)  Linux swap

Block size=512, Number of Blocks=156301488
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Why the PowerPC and not the Intel model? Diversity. Diversity equals survivability on the Internet. I buy Dr. Dan Geer's argument, and I want this box to survive the next target-of-opportunity worm or unstructured threat. I realize a structured threat will find G4 assembly programming a slightly higher obstacle than Intel assembly, but that might buy me some time. In any case, I was able to retire a much larger, noisier, slower, and electricity-hungry HP Visualize B2000 workstation by buying the Mini -- without changing how I do business. The PA-RISC box ran Debian too. Beautiful.