OSX and Freebsd : what could be a good setup

[Panna]

I've purchased a new emac with OSX 10.3.
It's soon to arrive and so I'm thinking about a good way of interacting 
the emac - which will be my main desktop - with my 5.2.1 server.
Until now I used a windows laptop with xp and the files where shared 
with samba.
So I thought that using an unixoid os would bring some advantages :-)
I think that I'll use hfs+ on the emac.
I've read about the hfs and hfs+ port but I doesn't want to take a risk.

The freebsd server should act as mail and news-server and also as file 
server.
Do I have to put the data on a fat32-slice?
If I setup a nfs-mount on the freebsd server and copy data from OSX to 
it, is the data readable from Freebsd without the hfs port?

You see I'm in a state of confusion..


Thanks in advance.
Sven Hohage