Not quite as old as your G3 i-mac, a Powermac G4 with no installation disks I had custody of last week took a network-based installation of Linux MintPPC quite nicely, and performed really quite well......as far as I could tell, all its features were handled well by the MintPPC software.
However, the owner preferred Mac OS X and I eventually managed to borrow a copy and successfully install it.
