Erhm, Hi!

I'm a total newbie to Linux, my experience of linux was my half a year of studies in Computer Science at the Univ of Helsinki, Finland, but I dropped out and never got around to get more familiar with Linux.

Background:
I'm a music producer and I'm looking for a 'powerful', dedicated system to drive my audio plugins and can be controlled via MIDI or (even better) Ethernet.

There is a dedicated hardware machine called Receptor by Muse Research (can't link since this is my first post - Google will find) but it's well out of my cash range. The thing is though, that it uses Open Source software and you can download the source at ftp.museresearch.com.

So being cheeky and all, my questions are:

1. Can this sofware be run on a normal PC without the Receptor?
2. Do I need to have a certain Linux installed to run this software?
3. Are there better solutions to my search for dedicated plugin machine?

I understand that you need to look at the source or at least the files to find out if 1 & 2 is possible, so I appreciate your help!

Extra info:
My main system - PowerPC G4 733 'Quicksilver', OS X 10.3.9, Logic Pro 6.

My stuff - mikseri.net/pjburnhill