Texas,
My suggestion is that if you want to play around with LINUX on your Mac get VMWare and install one of the good LINUX installs, UBUNTU or another good one, in a virtual machine, and play to your heart’s content, without compromising the UNIX install of the system. If it gets compromised, kick it to the curb and reinstall a new version. Boom, you are back in business in minutes. You can do the same with multiple versions of Windows. All you need is sufficient hard drive space, which is cheap enough these days.
I absolutely second Swordmaker's advice:
> > My suggestion is that if you want to play around with LINUX on your Mac get VMWare and install one of the good LINUX installs, UBUNTU or another good one, in a virtual machine, and play to your heart’s content, without compromising the UNIX install of the system. If it gets compromised, kick it to the curb and reinstall a new version. Boom, you are back in business in minutes. You can do the same with multiple versions of Windows. All you need is sufficient hard drive space, which is cheap enough these days.I'm a Unix System Admin, been working with Unix since around 1984, and run pretty much all flavors of stuff on Mac hardware these days at home -- OS-X of course, but also Windows7, WinXP, NetBSD, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora (the latter two being RedHat variants), and some others... I do it at work to make a living and at home as a hobby. (Details here if you want 'em)
Leave your OS-X install unsullied, and mess with the VMs. For around $50-75 get a copy of VMware Fusion for your Mac and a big hard disk, and play to your heart's content!!