The majority of the OS X -specific aspects have to do with how it launches (launchd .plist files) and how it automagically resolves .dev domains (using /etc/resolver - see: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin... )

Substituting launchd is easily done with any process launcher of your choice. As for the .dev TLD trick - that's a little harder, as OS X 10.6 has support for flat files inside /etc/resolver/* which the name of the file indicates what configuration/settings to use when resolving that domain. As such, they just drop a file named 'dev' in there and tell it to look to localhost on a custom port for DNS resolution. Then they run a mini DNS server on that port to resolve .dev domains to localhost.

Probably the only way to do something similar to this for linux would be to run a name server of your own on your box and add a custom zone configuration for the .dev TLD and recursive lookup for anything else.

Yea this is interesting, with a little fiddling I was able to get the webserver up. It's not picking up my app yet. Though I'm not sure if it's because it's not being initialized or because I can't reach it due to not having the dns setup.