Very cool! ;-) I think I might still have a 4.1.1 box around somewhere! It's funny how much you can do on an old Intel when you run a real OS on it, isn't it? On my Pentium 3 box, I have everything from LDAP and web servers, to SOCKS proxies running.
> Now the choices I've ben comtemplating are a G5 or a DUO processor
> something at about half the price. If I go with the DUO-something, I
> have to face the process of rebuiling the OS. If I go with the G5, I
> have to the take the chance that putting GNU programs like emaces and
> TeX need to be loaded as binaries or I have to down load a compiler
> and bundle of libraries (i.e build a development envirnoment) on the
> system to get GNU stuff to work on OS X.
A preliminary question though: it's not clear what you mean by rebuilding the OS. Do you mean you would run a Linux distro (or *BSD? Last time I checked only NetBSD had a serious PowerPC port) on the Mac? If not, then the processor choice is not significant other than for application support (some PowerPC apps are not yet available as Universal Binaries).
WRT Tex, Emacs etc, there are a couple of answers:
1) There is a TeX distribution available for Mac that I am currently using and it is pretty decent. I am not composing this message online, so I cannot search for it, but I will as soon as I can. In the meantime, look for TexShop (it is a LaTeX editor of sorts and the site has links to the MacTeX distribution).
2) For other GNU packages, you have two options: DarwinPorts (my preference) or Fink. Both are packaging systems that pull GNU sources or binaries from the net and install them on your Mac. I have not played much with Fink, which has some differences (more GUI etc), but for DarwinPorts there is a separate install tree under /opt/local that you can use. DarwinPorts, as the name implies, is based on the idea the FreeBSD ports system, which should give you some convert. So, installing emacs might be as simple as:
$ sudo port install emacs
Why not TeX this way too? AFAIK, TeX is not available within DarwinPorts.
Note that MacOS X already ships with things like perl, gcc, etc (in /usr/bin).
If you are into the fancy development environments, there is Eclipse for Mac and also Mac's own XCode, which is pretty elegant, and which seems to support Unix development.
--ravi