I started with installing 10.4 since I had the disks and I wanted to get more info about the machine itself from the horse's mouth. I had forgotten to look at the sticker that has the model's specs that's usually somewhere partially hidden (on the inside of the G5's case, near the groove for the side panel) which would've given me the info I needed quicker.
Obviously, the only other option is a Linux distro, to which I started with Ubuntu (technically Lubuntu) 14.04. I booted into the live and was met with a weird graphical glitch, and eventually tried the suggested
live video=ofonly, which cleared it up. (Though this was after I became more patient with it booting from the DVD.) After installing Lubuntu, I had a lot of troubles getting it to go to the desktop - if I left it alone, it'd hang; if I used radeon.modeset=0, it'd boot into the system but corrupt the video so bad I didn't know what was going on (only way I could tell was that when I hit the power button, the broken video would change a bit and hitting enter would shut it down). I tried a lot of things - even putting the hard drive I was using in the Dell to read the logs - but eventually just took a break and left it alone.
When I was moving it from the loft into the other room (which has my entertainment centre), I decided to swap the Dell's monitor with a Dell monitor I had refurbished (but left to the side) which I was using as the monitor for the G5, and when I was going to boot into Ubuntu 12.04, I missed the timing for the boot from CD command (holding "c" at the startup sound) and booted into Lubuntu from the hard drive without any problems. I was very confused (since I didn't realise that I had missed the timing) and looking for the install shortcut. After rebooting into the Ubuntu disk, I was still a bit confused, but started the install process anyway, which is when I realised that I was actually in Lubuntu when I missed the timing; I finished with the install anyway and tested out how it was before reinstalling Lubuntu. I couldn't find vsftpd in the software manager, so I decided to update to see if that made any difference, and in a way it kinda did: it froze. Trying it again yielded the same results, and I did it one more time with a different hard drive just to see if it was the drive or not ("luckily" it wasn't the drive). I installed Ubuntu and began updating it, which also resulted in the crash - needless to say, I was quite off-put about it.
Gentoo was next, which I began installing, but after taking 3-4 hours to get halfway through the installation process (not to mention it was 3 in the morning), I decided to go to bed instead. (For those who are unfamiliar with Gentoo, you must manually install it, which gives greater compatibility with the programs you install later.) Gentoo will be one of the last few I try, since it'll take quite some time to install (I think the BSD bunch are also "manual" install types, I don't know yet).
I recently tried Fedora, but it wouldn't boot from the DVD for whatever reason. I've just recently reburned it, so maybe it'll work... If not, one more reburn at x1 speed, then I'll have to try the net install... Which always seems to give me troubles.
For now, I will say that I'm quite determined to get a Linux distro on this thing, as it's probably going to make it a more reliable FTP server than OSX will. My best friend will be getting a replacement sensor, so hopefully that will help the fan speed problem (when he gets it) and a couple of large hard drives (hopefully it reads the entire size). I will also make another update, but I'm sure you've already expected that.
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