Re: Would Debian/PPC run ok on an ibook 500 with 192 ram? I am buying a new laptop soon and could use this one for experiences :-)
Yes it should run well on that computer.
you could also give a try to gentoo, it's running fine on a ibook with pd, pdp, pidip, gem (blablabla) and it has an "ok" documentation. the only problem i had so far was the audio acting weird sometimes (very low or way too high) but i didn't have time to check it deeply (it's not my ibook), anyway it's an alsa related problem and you may have the same with debian and this ibook model. Besides this, everything is well supported (concerning this ibook model), the only annoying thing i found was the mapping of the right and middle click to the keyboard, but well ... that's mac :)
+! aym3ric.