1. No. It uses Notes RPC to communicate with the server, so no worries
2. Well, the friendly GUI for server commands (in an X session) can be the jconsole. Start your server using the script (from the redbook), and you can start jconsole. For the other administrative tasks, you must use the Administrator client from another machine, or the webinterface (
http://server/webadmin.nsf), which you can use partially (I think) from Linux/Mozilla. So administration is generally NOT done locally.
3. i'd like to refer you to the redbook :-) The jconsole works great, and it works the same on both windows and linux platforms. You can also connect to the Domino controller from another machine using jconsole, and you can open several servers at once with it !
The redbook really has all the information you need, maybe try and find the Administrators redbook on the redbook website as well...
cheers,
tom