Anything & everything you ever wanted to know about loading Yellow Dog linux onto a Mac Mini. I dunno about the whole "low-cost" thing, though. Cheapest Mac Mini Froogle was serving up was $450, & that only had a 40GB hard drive. Not much in the way of storing multimedia on that thing...

"This short series of articles shows you how to take a conveniently inexpensive, high-end PowerPC® platform (specifically, an Apple Mac mini) and build it into a home multimedia appliance using Linux™. At the end of the series, you'll have a stand-alone device that can play slide shows of images, audio, and movies, and that is controlled and administered from another machine using a standard Web browser."