For your information only.
A customer denoted an IBM p4 series machine to me, which is a power pc architecture.
I succeeded installing Debian 64 bit and all the needed development stuff. Interestingly, there is an open-jdk 1.6 available beyond the ibm sdks.
I checked out geotools/geoserver and started some builds, looks not bad. For the future, if there are problems reported, I can turn on the machine and do active development to debug/fix issues.
I will not run a hudson build server 24 hours a day because of
1) energy costs (2 power supplies)
2) the noise, after 2 hours you have to escape from your own working room
3) the dust caused by all these fans working like crazy
But for problem fixing it is nice to have 
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