I've gotten my hands on not one, not two, but three old G4 PPS boxes, with 450Mhz, 256 RAM, and 30 GB each. I'm going to scrap two and make one super box, and hopefully find a motherboard for two CPUs. I want to install Linux on one hard drive, make another OS X, and make the last one hold music and photos etc. I was considering installing openSUSE, and I have a few questions.

1. Would openSUSE be a good choice on what is sort of an old machine? It'll have 768 in RAM, and hopefully two CPUs, but that's not guaranteed.

2. What file system should I use on the third hard drive so that both OS X and Linux can read/write it.

3. How would Linux (probably SUSE) react to two CPUs?

The most problem common with Linux and two CPU's is that one of them isn't used. That's why you'll need to use the SMP kernel or something. The only computer I've ever used with two CPU's and Linux was a Compaq Professional Workstation 6000 running two Intel Pentium II processors, and Ubuntu 6.06.

As for the filesystems, you could use FAT32. Both Mac OS 10 and Linux support reading and writing to it, I think.

This one depends on what you're planning on using. Are you trying to get a desktop system, like GNOME and KDE, or are you trying to get a CLI (command line interface) system? If you're trying to get a CLI system, it'll most definitely work, but GNOME and KDE might be a little slow. It depends on your CPU. You'll have plenty of RAM to run XGL/Compiz.

Well, I'm going to use is for coding on GCC and the gimp.

In that case, your hardware is plenty.

run slackintosh on them, maybe use them as a cluster i doubt that OSX can deal with those types of hardware variations. Never used SUSE but i would stick with a very minimal distro like slackintosh, or debian ppc

Your think so, even on just one 450 CPU?